C'mon C'mon (We're Gonna Get It Started)

Continuing on the Sloan kick, I've decided to pull out some of their previous discs to see how they stack up against the new one. 2005's A Sides Win compilation was a nice encapsulation of Sloan's greatness, but one downside with greatest hits albums is that they almost make the source albums expendable and invisible. The greatest hits album with highlights from each record becomes a nice substitute for the record itself. I'm going to revisit these Sloan CDs one at a time to reacquaint myself with them, starting with 1998's Navy Blues, one of my favorites of their many albums.



Navy Blues is now out of print in these United States, but isn't that difficult to find used for just a few US dollars. And well worth those dollars tool. This is Power Pop with two capital P's, equally powerful and poppy, in contrast with some of the others. The two tracks that made it to A Sides Win were the two Canadian hit singles from the disc, "Money City Maniacs" and "She Says What She Means", but the album sounds like a list of singles. A few of the songs are Beatlesque in a good way, combining the pop smarts of Rubber Soul with the group rocking of Abbey Road. "Chester the Molester" is "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Iggy & Angus" sounds more like "Come Together" than either Iggy Pop or AC/DC. But it's not so much copycat Beatles as what the Beatles would sound like if they were from Halifax instead of Liverpool and came of age in the 90s instead of the 60s.

Earlier this week, Idolator posted a couple of Navy Blues songs , for anyone who needs to be reminded (or introduced) to this album's greatness. Was it really nine years ago?

• Sloan - Money City Maniacs (mp3)
• Sloan - C'mon C'mon (We're Gonna Get It Started) (mp3)