Sloan and Afternoon Delight

Contributed by Dave Lemay

Full disclosure: I think I still like these guys, which should normally disqualify my entry. But I get slightly ashamed and nauseous as the associated memories spew forth, which seems warrant enough to pursue this confession.

And with no small amount of self-gratification I retraced my love affair with Sloan, those bastions of classic rock hailing from Toronto, Canada: those shameless cataloguers of the original British invasion; those inveterate peddlers of rock and roll nostalgia.

It may come as no surprise that such hard-working respectable Atlantic boys would still be plucking away some twenty years later - and indeed they have been recording and touring consistently right into middle-age. While they seem to be holding up rather well (Chris Murphy still looks and acts like a kid with his mopish hair and his too-big wire-frame glasses) it is not always the case about their music. To their merit they have released 10 albums throughout this period, from Smeared (1992), up to Parallel Play (2008) last June. Though my steadfast devotion ended about 1998 with the release of Navy Blues and Sloan's progression into classic rock, it is fair to say that their prodigious output has always been tempered by an uneven quality. While their musicality is undeniable, many songs fail to stand-out and sometimes sound like an uninspired study in rock-abilia while others seem too contrived to bare any real scrutiny.

Take for example the following lines from "I can feel it" off the album Twice Removed (1994) —  what was for a time my favorite Sloan song but now seems unbearably saccharine and indulgent.

You could tell a million lies


And I'd think they all were true

Trust


That's my trust in you

...or plainly pubescent:

No strings attached


No copy to match


No drift to catch

No plans to hatch

No itch to scratch

Just infatuation

Is all you need

...and just downright questionable value for our ardent youth:

But you've got a thing for me


I can feel it, I can feel it


And I've got a thing for you, too

You can have it, you can have it

Certainly infatuation is not all you need. Venereal disease stalks the brash and heedless and that's something that 'you can have' that can't easily be gotten rid of.

As with every itched scratched, there is the requisite self-loathing and plainly I am not exempt.

As I write this, I am painfully aware that I am not only ridiculing something that I once identified with, but I am also intruding on some very fond moments that I shared with friends: the first mix tape that I ever received, that included "I can feel it"; an aimless weeknight in the back of a Toyota Tercel listening to One Chord to Another (1996) and debating its relative merits to Twice Removed — still my personal favorite, sorry Rob. 

Have I become an asshole? Maybe. Probably — I don't think I was born that way. 

I am in fact one of those people that never really listen to lyrics — to the amusement and consternation of my wife and friends. I only hear the musicality of the song, which makes it really hard to sing along and really easy to mess up words. 

It also leads to the sometimes embarrassing re-interpretation of a song's meaning, not unlike the moment in Arrested Development when Maeby and Michael sing a duet to "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band only to discover its suggestive meaning half-way through the song — or in my case, 15 years later.

I am sufficiently sentimental, I think, that melody is all I need to hear. And besides, I still think Twice Removed is an awesome album.