The story of Sloan's Twice Removed has been told a few times, but it goes something like this: a scrappy Halifax band establishes label, Murderrecords, then gets signed to Geffen's DGC after touring grunge-inspired Peppermint EP and Smeared. Halifax is looked upon as the ‘New Seattle.’ The same scrappy band then produces an incredible pop album, Twice Removed, with Jim Rondinelli in NYC. Geffen hates it and refuses to promote it; band reluctantly but proudly leaves label, breaks up then reunites, puts in twenty more years releasing over a dozen more albums and Twice Removed becomes cherished.I've been listening to Twice Removed since it came out in 1994 and even more since last year's deluxe box set extravaganza. It's a record that I instinctively clutch to my heart as if to connect the material object to all my ephemeral memories of it. By most accounts, the context of its creation was a victory of independent vision over corporate music culture. Geffen wanted Sloan to keep sounding like Smeared, but Sloan wanted to make something timeless, genuine and true. On the surface, the songs are constructed simply; poetics of lust, divorce, depression, anxiety. Clean tones, four very different people.Here's a scene: on the road home from Sappy Fest 9, my buddy Paul hit play on Twice Removed. I asked why he put it on and he said because we were driving home from Sappy Fest, a festival that almost couldn’t exist without Sloan. As she drove us, our friend Nicole sang every lyric that came from the only working speaker in her ‘93 Ford Taurus. “I think ‘Loosens’ is my least favourite,” I said to no one, “Hey, the car and this album is the same age.” I forget that other people love Sloan as much or more than I do.The songs passed with the kilometers and we talked about the band. Paul’s mom took him to see Sloan in sixth grade. Nicole saw them at Halifax's once-famous Sam the Record Man, and one time (not even that long ago) I snuck into a sound-check and Andrew Scott put me on the guest list and then, at the show, I got kicked out for shoving people. I bragged that Sloan signed my box set and isn’t it cool that Chris Murphy stole a fan letter to Kurt Cobain then lifted the words for “Penpals.” Have you heard the demos?By this point, “Deeper than Beauty” came on, and for the first time in my life I think I really heard it. It felt like so much more than a sweet little rock song with sick drums. I realized Chris Murphy’s teenage crush had not wavered or waned in over twenty years. The girl and her “hideous glasses” are symbols of all the things we really want but will never really have. We sat quietly during the reverb open of “Snowsuit Sound.” Silver swings, braces. Twice Removed is so elementary in its design and so innocent in its appearance that, twenty years later, I’m just starting to understand its beautifully complex intentions.Everything takes time.Twice Removed established Sloan as an independent band, one of Halifax’s first and finest in the genre. The song-writing patterns organized their next eight studio albums and each member began to inhabit the particular sonic structures they created on Twice Removed. Without breaking ground, the walls began to bear different loads: Ferguson’s affinity for classic pop melodies, Pentland’s ambition as a rock and roller, Murphy’s moody but clever lamentations and Scott’s hazy and depressive ballads. It’s a solid build and, as such, Twice Removed has been considered one of the best Canadian albums of all time, twice.It seems weird that the value of Twice Removed can only be estimated in hindsight, by the crowd of bands for whom it’s an influence, the number of copies it continues to sell or the volume of people’s personal memories to which the album is anchored. These songs are perennial, becoming more relevant with time, and that hour with Nicole and Paul is just another constellation in the universe of this album’s meaning.
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