Sloan

SLOAN
“Never Hear the End of It”
(Yep Roc)

Critics’ Choice / New CDs

There are 30 songs on Sloan’s “Never Hear the End of It,” a playlist that’s part stunt and part statement by a band that has always been equally fond of and self-conscious about pop. It’s the eighth studio album by Sloan, the pre-eminent rock band to emerge from Nova Scotia and one of Canada’s most popular bands for the last decade.

The album connects Sloan’s open worship of melodic 1960s rock — primarily the Beatles, but also the Beach Boys, the Kinks and Pink Floyd — to the recurring, increasingly warped revivals of it. Sloan has absorbed 1970s soft rock and power pop, 1980s new wave and 1990s low-fi indie rock. Recorded in the band’s Toronto rehearsal studio and elsewhere, “Never Hear” is as close to Guided by Voices as Sloan has previously been to the Zombies, Stealers Wheel, Squeeze or XTC.

All four band members are songwriters, and they churn out material as if they’re determined to keep a disappearing style from extinction. The instrumentation
— guitars, predigital keyboards, bass, drums — sounds vintage; the most modern style is a glimpse of punk.

In a fictionalized career outlook called “Fading Into Obscurity” the band sings, “Interest in me dissipated/All my methods antiquated,” while suggesting that the music Sloan loves, “had so much potential/To be delicious and still be influential.”

The album is proudly kaleidoscopic. Those 30 songs run between 52 seconds and 5_ minutes long, and even among the short ones, only a few come across as fragments. The tracks are run together so the album works almost as a 77-minute suite. It’s a pop-rock marathon, galloping through songs about romance (“Last Time in Love”), music (“I Know You”), paranoia (“Living With the Masses”), media (“Set in Motion”), despair (“It’s Not the End of the World”) and willed optimism (“I Understand”). Most of the songs stand up separately, but the album’s cumulative effect is even better: a sheer abundance that insists there’s enough pop to give every human concern a tune.
JON PARELES - The New York Times

By JOHN KOSIK, The Associated Press

Sloan, "Never Hear The End Of It" (Yep Roc Records): Each successive release from Sloan becomes a bigger and bigger event for their fans, and the band's eighth full-length, "Never Hear The End Of It," is bound to have them debating in earnest — hence the title, perhaps.

Is this their greatest statement so far or just an interesting experiment?

You be the judge of the 30 tracks and nearly 80 minutes of seamless music that comprises the record. You'd think there might be some filler in there somewhere. Go ahead and try to find it.

Guitarists Patrick Pentland and Jay Ferguson, bassist Chris Murphy and drummer Andrew Scott can't seem to come up with a weak idea.

The harmony vocals float along throughout, and Sloan pulls out everything from their bag of tricks — 60's bubblegum, 70's rock, power-pop, acoustic folk, piano balladry and psychedelia. Every twist and turn they take is a treat and keeps the disc oddly focused for all the variety it contains.

Trying to choose just a few standouts is too close to call. Even the tracks that are barely over a minute long — which serve more as great ideas than songs — leave you salivating for more.

The blissful pop of "Who Taught You To Live Like This,""Last Time In Love" and "Fading Into Obscurity" is simply fantastic. You might also try scratching the surface of Sloan's peerless musicianship with "Right or Wrong,""I Understand,""Set in Motion,""Ill Placed Trust" and "Last Time In Love."

"Never Hear The End Of It" proves what an undeniable shame it is that these Canadian indie rockers isn't one of the biggest bands in the world.

Maybe that's their charm. - Associated Press - AP Breaking News

These Canadian power-pop wizards routinely write songs with dozens of parts. Now they’ve written an album with dozens of songs. Never Hear the End of It, Sloan’s eight studio full-length, contains 30 separate tunes – evidence of their bottomless bag of hooks, as well as a testament to endless Canadian winters, when leaving the studio ain’t much of an option. The result plays like the greatest British Invasion best-of you’ve ever heard. Reach in and pull out anything; even the so-so ones are gone is 60 seconds.
MIKAEL WOOD
- SPIN

Sloan
Never Hear The End Of It (Yep Roc)

There's a typically Sloan-like joke in the title of the band's eighth studio album, Never Hear The End Of It, which crams 30 songs into 76 minutes, and threatens to send even Sloan fans into power-pop overload. It'll take a strong constitution to weather power chord after power chord, and soaring harmony after soaring harmony, but for those who can hack it, Never Hear The End Of It is a rare thrill: an album brimming with inspiration and energy. It's Sloan's first real swing at enduring rock glory since the majestic 1996-1999 trilogy of One Chord To Another, Navy Blues, and Between The Bridges.

Never Hear The End of It has been broken up into mini-suites, with abbreviated songs often hooking seamlessly together. "Fading Into Obscurity" is the album in miniature, charging from a thick, slow intro into Badfinger chug and back again, before brightening up at the end with a sparkly midtempo coda. These songs don't have a lot of fat, and between the big glam choruses, handclap-aided bridges, zigzag melodies, and fuzzy guitar interplay, Never Hear The End of It plays like a customized accessory for shag-carpeted vans and wood-paneled rec rooms. It's music for the amiably dissatisfied.

"Fading Into Obscurity" is also indicative of the rest of the album in that it sports clunkily self-deprecating lyrics, which is a mode Sloan slips into too easily. And although it's terrific that all four members are talented songwriters with complementary styles, the album does start to run into a rut in its final third, with only the magnificently moody finale "Another Way I Could Do It" standing out from a lot of formlessly heavy anthems and mushy ballads. But even if Never Hear The End Of It isn't as great as the sum of its parts, those parts—so shiny and charmingly hand-made—amount to a tremendous lot.

A.V. Club Rating: B+ Reviewed by Noel Murray
- The Onion

Well into its second decade, this Canadian quartet once influenced by My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth now writes, plays and sings cheery, straight-ahead rock that recalls the Beatles, Crowded House and XTC. You can do much worse in choosing your forefathers, and Sloan's good taste permeates this release. Relentlessly inventive and enthusiastic, the music cascades as if the 30 songs were one long, sparkling piece. What would the second side of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" have sounded like if it were more than 80 minutes long? At its best moments, this disc, which was released in the U.S. on Tuesday, comes close.
By JIM FUSILLI - Wall Street Journal

Sloan, Never Hear the End of It:

This popular Canadian band’s latest opus is ironically titled, considering that more than a third of the disc’s 30 songs clock in at less than two minutes. With its cheery harmonies and clomping skate-rink rhythms, Sloan recalls the days when rock stars wore thigh-high space boots and shiny knit bodysuits — but without the musical excesses. Such brevity doesn’t allow much room for developing songs, but Sloan actually turns that into a strength. When the moment of power-pop bliss can’t sustain for another minute, it shows great restraint to pull the plug at 1:39.
— Mansfield
- USA Today

4/5 bunnies

Despite their roots in the remote cold and relative isolation of Halifax , Nova Scotia , Sloan is one of the best Canadian rock acts for 15 years running. There's not much about Sloan to distinguish them from other power-pop acts, except that each Sloan album offers that most elusive of qualities: sugar-rush consistency. Only a group like Sloan that's stacked with four prolific songwriters could produce an album like the aptly titled Never Hear the End of It, with its whopping 30 -- yes, 30 -- songs. The band delivers one perfect nugget after another with nary a breather in between, and no single track overstays its brief but impressively efficient welcome. It's non-stop fun, giddy from the start and never lets up. If there's an ironic downside to an album with no low points it's that there are not really any conspicuous high points either, but that's of minor concern. The disc is like the end of Abbey Road , stretched out for an hour-plus of pure-pop pleasure.

-- Joshua Klein - Playboy