Action Pact

07/24/2004 12:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Lyndsey Parker

In the words of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut's Oscar-nominated theme song: Blame Canada. Sure, the country that a Simpsons episode once snidely dubbed "America's Hat" has brought us some marvelously subversive and groundbreaking comedy (Kids In The Hall, Ren & Stimpy, SCTV, Mike Meyers), but c'mon--Canadians have to possess some sense of humor, since most of the musical drivel their nation has exported in the past decade alone (Alanis, Avril, Celine, Nickelback, Simple Plan, Sum 41) is enough to have any self-respecting rock fan crying into his/her Molson. And while the recent rise of credible north-of-the-border bands like the Stills, Metric, Broken Social Scene, and Hot Hot Heat is encouraging, it somehow makes the continuing undeserved obscurity of Nova Scotian powerpop gods Sloan all the more infuriating. After all, why should those aforementioned Cannuck newbies hog all the glory that once belonged to Loverboy and Rush, when Sloan have been dependably releasing near-perfect collections of clever, kick-ass garage/psych/bubblegum (including 1994's Twice Removed, which The Chart magazine declared the "Greatest Canadian Album Of All Time") for more than a decade? That's just plain wrong, wrong, wrong--wronger, even, than Avril Lavigne's pronunciation of David Bowie's name.

Action Pact is the Halifax quartet's sixth album (or seventh, if you count their absolutely Budokan-caliber live double-CD, 4 Nights At The Palais Royale), and like its worthy predecessors, it comes across like a lovingly compiled mixtape or a particularly bitchen K-TEL compilation of '70s AM radio pop gems, the schizophrenic result of a sort of college rock-vs.-arena rock divide between the band's main songwriters. On one side, there's Chris Murphy and Patrick Pentland, who favor unabashedly swaggering, flying V-brandishing, drumstick-twirling, doobie-kindling cock-rock (note the crunchy, glammy/hammy stomp of muscle-car anthems "Gimme That," "I Was Wrong," and "Live On"); on the other, there's the kinder, gentler Jay Ferguson, whose twee soft-rock compositions ("False Alarm," "Fade Away," "Step On It, Jean") are the real sleeper/keeper tracks amid Action Pact's more sledgehammering selections. Even if this dichotomy didn't work (although, rest assured, it most certainly does), Sloan would still be blessed to boast three such sublime writers among their ranks, when most bands--including many currently taking up space in the upper echelons of the U.S. charts, lamentably--don't even have one.

Although recent U.S. tours as the handpicked opening act for admirers like Jet and the Strokes might help boost Sloan's profile, the Sloan guys don't seem to be too concerned with Stateside success, as their homeland has very been good to them (they have several Canadian top 10 albums and Juno Awards to their credit). So it's no surprise that in Action Pact's toe-tapping, hand-clappping, Monkees-esque singalong "The Rest Of My Life," they proudly declare, "One thing I know about the rest of my life--I know that I'll be living it in Canada!" Hell, if there are more well-kept-secret bands in the Great White North that are this fan-effin'-tastic, maybe this writer will move up there, too.