Sloan
Pomona, CA, Glass House
June 29, 2002

One of my first online friends made me a tape with several tracks from Sloan's "Twice Removed" album back in 1994 and I've been hooked ever since. You would think that I've seen them a billion times in the past eight years but this past Saturday was my first time at a Sloan gig. It's actually really annoying that I've never seen them. One time I threw a house party on the same night of their gig, and the worst-missed-Sloan-show was when I was talking about how great they were at a club and someone said, "Didn't you see them last week?" I had no idea they were even on tour! Needless to say, I wasn't going to miss this show for the life of me.
The Glass House is actually two venues. One is a normal size club-type venue, the other is a little closet which hold a few hundred people at the most. Sloan played three shows in the area so they were easily a "closet" band.

Sloan came on stage right at 10:10 like the schedule said and announced that a few friends who worked on their "Twice Removed" album made a surprise visit so they are going to start with a little tribute to that album and kick off with "Penpals" then "I Hate My Generation". They continued with several tracks from their new album, "Pretty Together" which I didn't recognize because I haven't bought it yet. Now it's time for the first band switch. Chris Murphy moves from bass to drums, Andrew Scott moves from drums to guitar, Jay Ferguson moves from guitar to bass, and Patrick Pentland probably changed guitars or something. With Andrew on guitar they head back into their "Twice Removed" tribute and played "People of the Sky" and "I Can Feel It".

Chris is a pretty animated bass player but that's nothing compared to his drumming. He's like a little rag doll that you shake with his hair flying everywhere, it's loads of fun to watch. He also throws in several fill-ins when they're not expected and little drum solos here and there.

The bulk of their set was their older material which I loved. They played several songs from my second favorite Sloan album, "One Chord to Another": "The Good In Everyone", "G Turns to D", "Everything You've Done Wrong" (with the band singing "ba da da ba" instead of the horn section. There should have been more then a hundred people there because it was such a special gig. But it didn't look like the small turnout even phased Sloan, they still played a great gig and were happy that anyone showed up.

Lately I've been going to a lot of shows that are just boring. These bands are just coming out and playing the exact same thing every night. And they even tour the US two or three times on a single album. There's no excitement, no feeling of "what's going to happen next" because you know what's going to happen, they're going to play the next song on the playlist. Sloan, on the other hand, just seem to play whatever they feel like. I'm sure they have an idea of what's going to happen before they go on stage but a lot of it also depends on the crowd and who shows up (obviously the focus on "Twice Removed" was for their friends in the audience). This is what makes a gig special. I have never seen Sloan and the bulk of the music was their old stuff which I haven't heard in years and nearly made me fall over. This was easily the best twelve dollars and fifty cents I spent on a concert in a long long time.