Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be

Sloan @ Bowery Ballroom 11/12/2014
Forty-Eight Portraits / Keep Swinging (Downtown) / Unkind / 13 (Under A Bad Sign) / You’ve Got A Lot On Your Mind / Three Sisters / I Hate My Generation / Carried Away / Suppose They Close the Door / You Don’t Need Excuses To Be Good // If It Feels Good, Do It / C’mon C’mon / Misty’s Beside Herself / Take It Easy / Who Taught You To Live Like That / Ready For You / The N.S. / Blackout / Love Is All Around / On the Horizon / Someone I Can Be True With / Ill Placed Trust / Cleopatra / The Other Man / Money City Maniacs /// We’ve Come This Far / The Marquee and the Moon / 500 Up

Sloan “The Marquee and the Moon”

Sloan’s current tour is very generous, with two full-length sets full of songs mainly taken from their new record Commonwealth, and cuts from the middle period of their career, from Navy Blues through Never Hear the End of It. It is not generous if you’ve come to see them play anything from One Chord to Another – it seems they’ve put set staples “The Lines You Amend,” “The Good In Everyone,” and “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” on hiatus for a while, maybe until they get around to doing a 20th anniversary tour for that record around 2016. As a person who has seen Sloan a bunch of times now I was kinda happy to get a break from those songs, and to get more from that middle era, which is definitely my personal favorite chunk of their catalog. I believe this was my first time seeing them play “The Marquee and the Moon,” and it was a major highlight of the show for me, as gorgeous and dramatic as I would’ve hoped.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sloan “You’ve Got A Lot On Your Mind”

The first set of the show was presented in the style of Commonwealth, with each of the members playing a three-song mini-set, except for Andrew, who did his side-long “Forty-Eight Portraits” in its entirety at the start. This was pretty much the only place in the set they could get away with that song – it’s sooooo long and meandering that it’d kill momentum entirely if put in the middle somewhere. Jay’s songs from the new album came off the best live, and pushed them into a space that’s a lot more elegant than the three other songwriters in their default positions. I was particularly impressed by the lead guitar parts in those songs – it’s so smooth and pretty on record, but jumps out at you more in person.

Buy it from Amazon.