sloan: action pact
(originally published to Dirty Monkey Bugspray Fun)
I was not happy with Action Pact when first I listened to it. It seemed too� 80�s, and at first not in a good way. It was like all those trashy Motley Cr�e, Van Halen, and other guitar driven songs that dominated the radio waves. But, at this point, having ingested it for the 15th time (at least, and trust me, at a paltry 38 minutes it�s not hard to do), that�s exactly the reason to like it.
Sloan has a knack for appropriating the sounds from the past and filtering it through their four-man conformity machine. Since their third album One Chord to Another, Sloan have developed something in their style that identifies their songs uniquely as that of Sloan. Whether you say �that�s just Sloan doing AC/DC� or �that�s just Sloan doing Zepplin� it�s still undeniably Sloan.
Action Pact is an album with forward momentum, each carried along with the strength of the strings, alternating between Jay Freguson and Patrick Pentland�s guitar in the driver�s seat. It�s twelve songs over almost as quickly as they start, and put together more tightly and consistently than any of the six previous efforts. Though this would be considered a plus with most artists, with this band it�s almost a detriment, considering how typically varied and diversified the song each member crafts usually are. But in Action Pact (after the abysmal Pretty Together and the plodding, abstract, and too diversified Between the Bridges) Sloan took the conscious effort to make a more controlled album, going to LA to work with producer Tom Rothrock (Badly Drawn Boy, Beck). Each member stuck to their key instrument, and drummer Andrew Scott kept himself out of the songwriting process to focus on fatherhood, so the quirky piano-pop is completely absent (whether that�s good or bad is for you to decide).
In the end, Action Pact seems like the first part of a two-disk set, though a second album isn�t necessarily forthcoming any time soon. With its brisk pace and the lack of extreme diversions in sound, it just seems that there is much missing.
Easily the best Sloan�s been since Navy Blues, let�s hope they get a little riskier on their next effort� or at least bring in the horns and keys once again.