Sloan live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 4 April 2018

Two days before their twelfth album reached shops, Sloan were booked into a club in Thunder Bay. The record is called 12, it came out on 6 April 2018, and the Crocks date fell on Wednesday, 4 April. Bands on the eve of a release are usually busy elsewhere, so it is worth noticing where this one stood.

Crocks was at 16 Cumberland Street South. The ticket was listed at C$30 in the online shop of Loffredo & Associates, and nothing else was published about the night: no opener, no doors time, no age line. The date went up on 15 February 2018.

The twelve songs

Sloan announced the album on 5 February 2018, ten days before this show appeared in the shop. It was recorded at their own Sloan Studios in Toronto between March and November 2017, produced by the band with Ryan Haslett, and released by Murderecords and Yep Roc Records. The four members wrote three songs each.

Chris Murphy wrote “Wish Upon a Satellite”, Patrick Pentland “All of the Voices”, Jay Ferguson “Right to Roam” and Andrew Scott “Gone for Good”. Those are one song apiece from a track list of twelve, and the rest are credited the same way, three to a writer.

The record reached number 44 on the Canadian albums chart and number 11 on Billboard’s Heatseekers list, the band’s best showing there. A Heatseekers placing is a measure for acts still building an American audience, an odd label for a band in its twenty-eighth year.

A band that never rearranged itself

Sloan formed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1991, and it is one of the few Canadian bands to keep the same four members for decades. Twice Removed, from 1994, and One Chord to Another, from 1996, are the records most fans name first. Twice Removed was reissued as a vinyl box set in 2012, and the band toured it, playing the whole album.

That habit of even shares is not new. Commonwealth, the double album from 2014, gave each member a side of his own. So 12 was a return to a familiar sum: four writers, equal space, no single voice in charge. It is the kind of arithmetic a Thunder Bay crowd could follow just by looking at the stage.

A night before the record was out

The band supported the album with a 30-date tour of North America. Thunder Bay’s date came first in the sense that mattered, two days ahead of release, so anyone in the room heard the new songs cold. No set list was published, and this page does not guess which ones were played.

A pre-release show is a strange kind of night. The band plays new material to a room that cannot sing along yet, and the older songs carry the evening until the room catches up. That is a reading of the schedule, not a claim about this particular set, and anyone who was there would know better.

The price and the room

C$30 is a mid-priced ticket by the standards of that year. Among the 12 Crocks shows on record for 2018, listed prices ran from C$13 to C$40, so Sloan sat in the upper half without reaching the top, a fair place for a band with twelve albums.

The shop labelled the ticket C$30 instead of a bare 30, which leaves no doubt about the currency, and no service fee was listed alongside it, unlike the online fees attached to the 2015 and 2016 sales at the same room.

Crocks had another Canadian act with a new record that year, and it came in the autumn. Great Lake Swimmers came in September, five weeks after The Waves, the Wake, and their night is on the Great Lake Swimmers page.

The track list reads as four small portfolios: Murphy’s “Don’t Stop (If It Feels Good Do It)”, Pentland’s “Have Faith”, Ferguson’s “The Lion’s Share”, and “44 Teenagers” from Scott. Scott’s title suggests a story, and it is the one on the list that a Thunder Bay reader might most want explained.