Jay Ferguson

As with any busy concert season, some shows must fall to the wayside.   This year, I spent a ton of time down in Hubbards, taking in shows at the legendary Shore Club.  Of all the shows I saw there, I wasn’t able to squeeze in Sloan’s 2025 Shore Club stop this year.  Fortunately, not long after that show wrapped, it was announced that the band would return to Halifax to play the Light House Arts Centre the night before Halloween.

The band was touring its latest album, Based on a Best Seller (the band’s 14th full-length), and, as the cinematic theme would dictate, the lights dimmed and the show opened with a handful of trailers for songs from the new record.    Once the trailers wrapped, it was time for the featured attraction.  Pat, Andrew, Jay, Greg and Chris hit the stage and immediately launched into “Capitol Cooler” (from the new album).   As stalwarts of the Canadian rock scene, Sloan has perfected the lean stage setup, with little more than mics, instruments, pedals, amps and of course, their immediately recognizable selves.

Andrew Scott

Lead vocal duties were passed around frequently throughout the set, as Sloan is known to do.  When it came time for Andrew to take the mic, stage positions were quickly juggled, with Chris Murphy sliding in behind the drum kit.   In looking back over the setlist, it was indeed one for the diehard Sloan fans, as it spanned nearly the entire Sloan catalogue, largely drawing from deeper cuts on each of the albums, while including a handful of prerequisites such as “Money City Maniacs”, “People in the Sky”, “Underwhelmed” and “The Good in Everyone”.   The night was broken up into two sets, and wrapped the night up with a 4-song encore.

For bands like Sloan, who have crafted such a vast discography, it’s easy to just pick the big hits to appease casual listeners, but doing so risks alienating those hardcore, OG fanbase.  Those are the folks who have heard the hits countless times and want to listen to the band delve into the darker, often-forgotten corners of their catalogue, which is exactly what the band delivered on the Light House Arts Centre stage in Halifax.    While it sucked to miss that Sloan Shore Club experience this year, I was happy to have the opportunity to catch the band at least once in 2025.

Sloan