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They’re Canadian, they’re big in Canada, and their methods bring to mind a New Yorker cartoon’s perfect (or perfectly American) distillation of the Canadian character: “You seem familiar yet somehow strange — are you by any chance Canadian?” Somehow strange:  Sloan’s singular band dynamic, where all four members contribute more or less equal numbers of songs, each writer determining how his songs are executed, and by whom, in the studio. Strange enough, in fact, for the band to point at it with the title of their new album (“parallel play,” the liner notes helpfully inform us, being a term developmental psychologists use to describe young children’s propensity for independent play in the company of other children). What’s familiar is the sound that results: various shades of power pop, songs reflecting the idiosyncrasies of their respective authors and copping (this time) from the likes of Badfinger (“Believe In Me”), the Who (“I’m Not a Kid Anymore”), ELO (“Witch’s Wand”), Cheap Trick (“The Other Side”) and even Highway 61 Revisited-era Dylan (“Down in the Basement,” which could as easily have been titled “The Ballad of Sloan”), all of it ending up somewhere near “classic.”

Standout Tracks: “All I Am Is All You’re Not,” “I’m Not a Kid Anymore” STUART MUNRO