rosslangager

I doubt I’ll ever need an ophthalmologist (and I’m not exactly clear on the circumstances in which I would), but I know for certain that if I do, I shan’t be requiring Rand Paul’s services. Any medical professional who equates doing his job (and being damned well paid to do it) with slavery can’t be too passionate about it, or, frankly, that good at it. No wonder he’s chucked it in favour of making hyperbolic analogies in Senate committee hearings. Perhaps he resents being “forced” to attend those, too, and is just lashing out at all of those fascists who expect him to, I dunno, be a Senator and asks useful questions about policy or something. Pure tyranny, it is.

In other news, as I covered as fully as I feel I should on my Twitter feed earlier today, there’s a new Sloan album out, and it’s solidly Sloany in its albumness. As I tweeted, I’m no longer the person who cared about Sloan albums and believed they were magical in any way, but then I don’t think I’ve been that person since I was in my teens. I’m not sure what kind of damaged person wants to be the person they were in their teens again, anyhow (although I have no doubt that they probably still watch Glee).

The brief flarings-up of dormant Sloan fandom here and again through my last decade never had much to do with the music the aging band was producing. It was down to circumstances, emotions, happenings, fleeting connections. Those four dudes and their well-crafted power pop, soldiering bravely (or foolishly) on into their 40s, might as well have not been involved. I enjoy vintage and even newer Sloan tunes to an extent, but my overall epistemological perspective on the band confines them to the status of a musical gateway drug. They’re fine and all, in their way, but they’ve been most useful in opening channels to greater things, and I’ve no doubt that their sleeve-worn influences have lead my wandering ears in musical directions better than themselves. Perfectly decent album releases aside, I doubt Sloan will ever be shifted from that position in my own scheme of things.