Making The World Safe for Canadian Indie Pop

08/19/1998 7:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Mac Randall

"The music industry doesn't take Canada very seriously," says Chris Murphy of Sloan, as he sits with his bandmates in his publicist's New York office signing a small mountain of vinyl albums with a silver pen. "You can understand why; it's about 4% of the world market in record sales. But I'll tell you something, and you can print this: If there's any fairly big band out there that wants to make some money, call us up and we'll put out their record in Canada. When they renegotiate their record deal, they should X out Canada--the record company won't care, that's namby-pamby business to them--and if they put the record out through us, we'll give them 70% of the money. They'll just make money hand over fist."

Fantastic as this statement may sound, it's grounded in solid experience. The four songwriters and multi-instrumentalists that make up Sloan--Jay Ferguson, Patrick Pentland, Andrew Scott and Murphy--are not only a band, but also heads of their own independent label, Murderecords, based in their hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Murderecords has been in operation for six years now, but in the past, the band chose to forgo the D.I.Y. sales approach outside Canada and signed deals with U.S. labels in an attempt to gain some commercial clout. Only now, after underwhelming experiences with both The Enclave and DGC record labels, have Sloan decided to take complete control, making Murderecords their worldwide label and negotiating separate distribution deals in various territories. As luck would have it, the band's first album under this new arrangement, Navy Blues (just released in the U.S.), has already become their most successful in Canada, rocketing them from cult status into the top 10.

"Everyone wants us to say that major labels suck," Murphy observes, "but all the people I met at Geffen were nice. And at The Enclave, they were cool too; they worked their asses off, but in the end everybody lost their job."

"In this day and age, though," Pentland adds, "I don't know what the role of a major label is. There are better ways to sell records if you can. All the majors are doing is throwing dice. We have just as much of a chance of getting somewhere on our own."

Though Sloan are still unknown to most Stateside listeners--a sad fact that one hopes Navy Blues will help correct--the band's previous three releases have been taken to heart by an ardent subgroup of retropop fanatics. Some of them may be surprised to hear traces of outright '70s classic rock in the new album's grooves, from the bruising Aerosmith-y riffs on "She Says What She Means" to the Skynyrd-ish harmony lead guitars on "Iggy & Angus."

"I think it's a fairly obvious extension of what we've been doing," Murphy says. "We have played rock before. On our second record [Twice Removed], we wanted to turn the guitars down 'cause we were getting tired of the glut of grunge. And I don't mean to constantly be reactionary, but there are a lot of 'smart, quirky' pop bands now that I don't want to be lumped in with. I'm into rock music and I always have been."

Still, most of Navy Blues is just what you'd expect from Sloan: sparkling, witty, melodic pop songs with often unorthodox arrangements and structures that show they've learned their psychedelic '60s lessons well. "Sinking Ships" is half White Album, half Magical Mystery Tour, climaxing with a near-symphonic brass coda, while "C'mon C'mon (We're Gonna Get It Started)" suggests a union of Sell Out-era Who and Tapestry-vintage Carole King. The King comparison triggers a bemused response from Murphy: "We all wanted to get our favorite Kings on this album. Jay's is Carole King, Patrick's is King Diamond, Andrew's is King Sunny Ade, and mine obviously is..."

"King Tubby?" Scott cracks as he glances up briefly from the issue of Q he's perusing.

"No, King's X," Murphy answers with a grin.

Navy Blues was recorded in Toronto, which is now the band's home base. Pentland, who moved there this year, was the last member to move from Halifax; Scott was the first, and he nearly broke up the group by changing his address in 1993. For the last five years, with the band's members separated by hundreds of miles, Sloan was more of a songwriting collective than a band. "We couldn't practice anymore," says Murphy. "And so whenever we played shows, it was pretty ragged. Now that we're all in the same place, we might actually be able to improve."

As I begin recalling a Sloan show two years ago at Brownies in New York, I pause for a moment: "I thought that you..."

"Sucked?" Pentland interjects.

No, not at all. It was a bit rough around the edges, but I'd prefer to describe it as freewheeling. Then as now, the four members of Sloan traded instruments onstage with astonishing regularity; practically every song boasts a different configuration. "That's because our roles change depending on whose song it is," Pentland explains. "We'd like to be perceived as one four-headed thing where everyone takes a turn at everything. We're a true democracy, for good and bad. That can work against us sometimes, but I think in the end it keeps the band together. Another reason why some of our live shows in the States have been rough is that we've had to rent gear, and that's sometimes caused a lot of technical difficulties. It's hard to bring all our equipment into this country."

Which brings us back to the predicament of being a Canadian band trying to get known in the U.S. Do the members of Sloan feel that there's an inherent suspicion of Canadian pop music in America, a feeling that Canadians can't really rock? "Sure," says Murphy. "Canada isn't exactly smug about its international music reputation. A lot of things from Canada have become super-huge, but not much of it is cool rock bands. You've got Alanis, Shania, Sarah McLachlan, Bryan Adams. I've gone through being embarrassed about Canada, but the fact is there's tons of cool bands there that you've never heard of, just as there are in the States."

Even though the band's momentum has been slow, Murphy says he's thankful for the way things have gone. "I'm glad we didn't have a great big hit at first. Otherwise, we'd be in the position Fastball is in now. They're a great band, but everyone just wants to hear one song. It's better to go slow, if you can stand it. I'm also glad that the band has stayed the same all these years, and that it's not just Patrick and I still out there with our new guitarist and our third drummer, the bald guy. We all still have our own hair."