Frankly, I didn't come to Sloan's eighth album expecting a whole lot. The Nova Scotian quartet's last two albums were patchy and sounded like a band that had grown complacent with simply kicking out serviceable guitar pop punctuated by the occasional stab at hard rock. These weren't bad albums, exactly, but after 1999's great Between the Bridges, subsequent releases Pretty Together and Action Pact were disappointingly MOR. So Never Hear the End of It comes as a pleasant surprise. It's the band's best since Bridges and possibly even One Chord to Another, the mid-90s disc that set their standard.
The album is a creative shake-up, the type of thing bands need to do to keep fresh more than 15 years into a career: Never Hear the End of It consists of 30 tracks that mostly flow into each other like a suite, though there are a few more conventional transitions. It's not entirely new for the band-- Between the Bridges didn't have track breaks either-- but they've never taken it nearly this far, giving equal weight to snippets, weird one-off detours, and fully fleshed-out potential singles, of which there are many.
This is a band with four songwriters and four singers, so to a certain degree variety is a guarantee on their albums, but the way this one jumps from ballads to near-punk eruptions keeps it unpredictable. The band also seems very self-aware, especially on "Fading Into Obscurity", a song written from the perspective of a former star that's a mini-suite in itself, moving from section to section with ease, the basic rock sound augmented with mellotron. It could be bitter, but instead opts for sweet humor: "This cake is baked but I much preferred the batter/ Perhaps in part because it had so much potential/ To be delicious and still be influential."
One of my biggest complaints about the album is how little of Jay Ferguson we hear in the lead-- only two songs feature him up front throughout, and they're among the best tracks on the album. I've always loved his voice, a liberally honeyed tenor, and his songs have a melodic ease to them that first recalls, and then transcends, 70s AM Gold. His "Right or Wrong" is a jangling, harmony-stuffed song that touches on the album's underlying theme of self-awareness, while "Before the End of the Race" is a far less self-consciously mature take on the adultery theme of "The Other Man" from a few years back.
An overabundance of self-conscious emotional maturity was a big part of what hampered Sloan's last two efforts, and the band lets itself have more silly fun in this new format. The result is that their artistic maturity is more fully displayed, both on beautifully realized songs like closer "Another Way I Could Do It", which poignantly illuminates the never-ending adjustments required by moving to a big city, to wild leaps out of the band's usual bounds like the punky, almost Wire-ish "HFXNSHC". Even seemingly small things, like the way lead single "Who Taught You to Live Like That?" contrasts big harmonies with a pounding arrangement that makes great use of a limited chord progression signal a creative revival.
Which is all great to hear, because for all their talk of accepting a slow fade in these songs, these four musicians are too good together to go out with a whimper. As a late-career stirring of the creative juices, this album is mostly successful, though among the thirty songs there are naturally a few that don't fully take. Sloan could've just as easily kept churning out good-but-not-great albums forever. To their credit, they've chosen a more difficult, more rewarding path.
