I Woke Up Like A Cop Just Told Me To Freeze

Sloan “Witch’s Wand” – The funny thing about Sloan’s previous album Never Hear The End Of It was the way its 30 track sprawl was sequenced so well that it ended up sounding like the tightest, most unified record the band had ever released. Their follow-up, Parallel Play, moves in the opposite direction — it’s brief and lean, but the group’s four singer-songwriters are on different pages, playing to their respective strengths and following their own muses. Chris Murphy and Andrew Scott favor scruffy power-pop eclecticism, Patrick Pentland continues to supply meaty yet weirdly aloof riff rockers that would do Stone Gossard proud, and Jay Ferguson refines his penchant for sleek, finely nuanced mid-tempo tunes that borrow liberally from old school R&B and lite FM groovers.

Ferguson is the most successful and consistent this time around. His friendly, low-key tenor has grown sweeter with age, and his arrangements have become increasingly spacious and graceful. All three of his numbers have a relaxed, warm vibe that sharply contrasts with the selections on Parallel Play penned by Pentland, who leans so hard on compression and studio effects to compensate for his comparatively thin singing voice that his tunes come out sounding rather crisp and chilly. The band use the drastic difference in tone to their advantage in sequencing the album — Pentland and Ferguson cuts are run back to back twice over, with the former’s tightly-wound rockers giving way to the latter’s mellow harmonies and gently floating chords. Whereas the two could easily clash, they instead work as each other’s foil, and give their album a greater sense of dynamics, if not stylistic unity. (Click here to buy it from Yep Roc.)