At first listen, Based on the Best Seller, Sloan’s 14th album, seems a little more relaxed and poppy than their previous record, 2022’s Steady. Further reflection, though, reveals that it’s just one of the band’s four members, bassist Chris Murphy, who is responsible for that sound. The other three musicians, particularly guitarist Patrick Pentland, bring songs that are as hard-rocking as ever.
Murph has been trending this way for a while. He and guitarist Jay Ferguson have always been the most likely members to show up with chamber pop songs. On Steady, two of his three tracks, the gossipy piano ballad “Human Nature” and the country-pop “I Dream of Sleep”, were similar. For Based on the Best Seller, he brings “Open Your Umbrellas”. It’s a bouncy piano shuffle challenging the listener to use an umbrella on a sunny day and see if they get any reactions from other people.
His “Fortune Teller” is an ornate pop song, with auxiliary percussion, thick vocal harmonies, trumpets, organ, and piano filling out the arrangement. The album closer, “I Already Know”, is an easygoing but briskly paced ballad that feels like a big slice of early 1970s AM radio pop. Murph does turn up the guitars once, on the shuffling but noisy “Live Forever”. In it, he lyrically scolds someone for saying they’d like to live forever, providing the counterpoint, “If we’re living for that long a time / Can it be a good time?”
The band‘s other three members make up for Murph’s relatively poppy turn here. Ferguson kicks things off with “Capitol Cooler”, a chunky midtempo rocker that begins with a possibly self-referential story about a singer apologizing to the audience for starting a concert late. The song sweetens up in the chorus, where the layered harmonies come in, but it never loses its churning feeling.
Pentland’s “Dream Destroyer” features big guitars and an even bigger chorus. This simple refrain, “Yeah, yeah, yeah / Dream destroyer,” is so good that the song starts by running through it twice before getting to the first verse. If terrestrial radio still existed in any real way and if anyone outside of Canada played Sloan, “Dream Destroyer” would be the kind of single bands dream about having.
Of course, drummer Andrew Scott also contributes a pair of songs. As usual, his slightly gruff baritone vocals and blues-rock leanings make Sloan almost sound like a different group. The hard-hitting but decidedly mid-tempo “Baxter” is the most Scott has rocked out in a while, but it still features an extended psychedelic outro that feels like a long cooldown. Then he one-ups the level of intensity on “No Damn Fears”, a full-on rocker that recalls earlier Scott tracks like “People of the Sky” and “On the Horizon”.
Ferguson’s other two tracks, “Congratulations” and “Collect Yourself”, are markedly different. The latter has a relaxed country-rock feel, although with Ferguson’s pure tenor voice, nothing sounds all that country. The former is an uptempo pop-rock track that’s light and airy, with a nice change-of-pace lead vocal from Murph in the bridge. It also returns to an odd but familiar Ferguson lyrical topic: fine art.
Pentland, on the other hand, keeps the guitars and hooks turned up to ten throughout. Almost everything in “So Far Down” is harmonized, and the chorus, “I heard you got a new boyfriend / You’re starting a new trend / ‘Cause I don’t have what you need,” is instantly memorable. “Here We Go Again” begins with acoustic guitars. After the earworm opening, “If you leave it up to me / That’s a problem, guaranteed,” all the electric guitars and vocal harmonies are immediately in.
As the title of their previous record, Steady, implied, Sloan have been a consistently great rock band for several decades. That is still the case with Based on the Best Seller. With four distinct songwriters, the group really moves through a lot of different subgenres without straying too far from their basic sound. For Based on the Best Seller, even Scott’s tracks fit in pretty snugly. Catchy melodies and big guitars are the order of the day, with a side of Murph’s jauntier piano-driven songs to change things up.