Sloan Bring Their Perennially Catchy Powerpop and Psychedelia to Bowery Ballroom

You remember Sloan, right? The Canadian Guided By Voices? They’ve got a characteristically burning, catchy, anthemic new album, simply titled 12 (since it’s their twelfth) streaming at Bandcamp, and a Bowery Ballroom gig tomorrow night, May 10 at 9 PM. General admission is $25.

The opening track, Spin Our Wheels has everything that made the band so popular back in the day: insistent downstroke guitars and a big stadium rock chorus, part Big Star, part Cheap Trick. “Watch how far we spin our wheels,” lead guitarist Patrick Pentland intones with sarcastic cheer.

The band build All of the Voices from spare, fresh-faced 60s Britpop to big-studio crunch, with a deliciously icy Pentland chorus-box guitar solo. “All of the choices you made are killing me,” is the refrain.

“The sun shadows the cool chalet,” bassist Chris Murphy sings in Right to Roam, a tongue-in-cheek 60s psych-pop travel narrative that wouldn’t be out of place in the Jigsaw Seen catalog. Murphy’s bass dances out of the mud, drummer Andrew Scott builds from spare and spacious to a steady shuffle, and the guitars build a folk-rock web in the Grateful Dead-inflected Gone for Good.

Rhythm guitarist Jay Ferguson’s gritty, distorted chords anchor The Day Will Be Mine, a relentless, vintage Cheap Trick-style anthem with a big Mick Ronson-esque solo from Pentland.

Essential Services is the band’s surreal, insistently pulsing Mr. Blue Sky:

Is everyone a soldier and there’s no end in sight?
And the ones that do the running exercise their right
To police tomorrow ‘cause they must be moving on
So much for the frontline, win the marathon

Don’t Stop (If It Feels Good Do It) is Sloan at their cynical, sarcastic, faux Chuck Berry best:

You’re site-specific, Mac
I’m under attack
The only time you cross the line
Is when you cross it back…
If I said your behavior suffocates, would you care?

Year Zero is a delicious blend of enigmatic 60s Laurel Canyon jangle and powerpop from ten years later. The band gets even more retro with Have Faith, a garage-rock nugget that could be the Flamin’ Groovies.

The Lion’s Share has a sparkly shine and a cynical singalong melody, part Smiths, part New Pornographers. By contrast, Wish Upon a Satellite has Quadrophenia-level Who bombast. The album winds up with 44 Teenagers, a broodingly swaying Beatlesque anthem, sort of a mashup of Paperback Writer and I Am the Walrus. Raise your lighters and sing along.