Finally home from work, and feeling as though I had the absolute crap kicked out of me today—seriously, guys, I thought we all agreed last week to stop talking about the University of Michigan Press’ Fall 2011 Catalog. Now time to enter armadillo mode, and curl into a protective shell of two or three pints and a steady stream of mid-nineties Canadian exports. First on the list is definitely Sloan.

As far as Canadian acts go, Sloan always seemed to do pretty okay stateside, never entering the BNL/Morissette stratosphere, but still chugging along (to this day) with occasional and fleeting success on the US Modern Rock charts. That the early Oughts (particularly The OC years) didn’t take even more a fancy to the band’s brand of plaintive indie pop is just one more datum on the depressingly expansive scatterplot of reasons why the music industry sucks—I mean, really, Rooney but not this?

Anyhoo, to resurrect a long dead hook, Sloan (and “Coax Me” in particular) is pretty much what Laszlo Toth will sound like between our genre-defining emotive dream pop phase (“dreamo,” obviously) and our purposefully difficult dalliance with avant-garde sludge—you know, during our critically adored but commercial stagnant pop period. Also we will have recruited a band member who hits high harmonies (without sounding like an asshole) and can write us some sick lyrical catachresis….