Sloan single is Spin My Wheels but band doing anything but

SLOAN “12” (UNIVERSAL)

It takes a lot of gall to call the first single from your 12th album “Spin My Wheels.” After all, that’s a phrase applied to many a new record by bands who are long in the tooth. I’ve used it myself. Often. Because when you get to a certain age, you’re inevitably going to fall back on cliché.

Sloan have been together for 25 years, and there have certainly been records in their discography where they have spun their wheels. This is not one of them. Close observers will note, however, that it falls into a consistent pattern of the last 20 years, in which every second record finds the band sounding energized and coherent, while the ones in between often have fans wondering why Sloan are still a band at all — and perhaps some members of Sloan might have wondered that themselves, like on 2014’s “Commonwealth,” where each of the four members penned and performed a side of a double record on their own.

But back to “Spin My Wheels”: it’s one of the finest singles Sloan has ever released (which puts it in excellent company), and also sounds like one of the oldest; both it and “The Day Will Be Mine” could well have come from 1992’s Smeared. “Spin My Wheels” is a song by bassist Chris Murphy, who recently played hooky with a new group called TUNS with Matt Murphy and Mike O’Neill; that band’s collaborative approach and spirited debut record seems to have ignited some competitive spirit in the rest of Sloan. Guitarist Jay Ferguson didn’t need prompting; he’s often come up with the killer hooks on the last few Sloan records, and here “Right to Roam” doesn’t disappoint. Guitarist Patrick Pentland comes out swinging with “All of the Voices” and “Have Faith.” Drummer Andrew Scott gets dreamier and psychedelic on “Gone for Good” and “44 Reasons,” the latter of which references the death of Gord Downie.

Even better than the strong songwriting this time out are the performances and the harmonies — not to mention the economy, as they cram all their ideas into 12 songs (of course), only one of which breaks the four-minute mark. This sounds like a band entering a whole new creative period of their career — together. Which is not something either the band or their fans should take for granted.

Stream: “Spin My Wheels,” “Right to Roam,” “The Lion’s Share”

JEREMY DUTCHER “WOLASTOQIYIK LINTUWAKONAWA” (INDEPENDENT)

“When you bring the songs, you’re going to bring the dances back. You’ll bring the people back. You’ll bring everything back.”

That’s a tall order to hear from an elder in your community, a community where the past 100 years of colonialism have left fewer than 100 people speaking the Wolastoqiyik language of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick. Those remaining people are known as the “song carriers” — needless to say, they are all elderly.

Except one. His name is Jeremy Dutcher, a young, classically trained tenor singer and pianist who lives in Toronto and hangs around experimental circles. His debut album, “Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa,” is not merely an academic project that involved him listening to his ancestors singing these songs, stored on 100-year-old wax cylinders at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que. If it was merely an interesting and culturally significant history project, that would be enough. But Dutcher’s voice and arrangements transform these songs into a stunning contemporary classical record — which was entirely the point. Even without the high concept, this would be a stunning work.

“In the period around the time these songs were collected there were a lot of what I call death narratives or the idea of Indigenous people as fading people,” Dutcher told the Noisey website. “I wanted to challenge that stereotype and say, ‘No, we’re here, we’ve been here. We’re still doing it’ … and challenge that idea of death.” And by creating such stark and emotionally affecting music that has more in common with Diamanda Galas and Perfume Genius than A Tribe Called Red, he’s also challenging stereotypes of Indigenous music. “When you think about Indigenous music, a lot of people go straight to big drum songs,” he told The Whole Note magazine. “So I think a big part of this project is also education: to blow up people’s ideas about what Indigenous music is, and what it’s going to be.”

Those ideas have evolved considerably in recent years, and Jeremy Dutcher’s dance with the dead is nothing short of transformative. That it’s his debut record makes it all the more remarkable.

Stream: “Mehcinut,” “Essuwonike,” “Pomok naka Poktoinskwes”