It’s hard to pretend I’m still excited about Sloan when even the band sounds bored.

Sounding at best like a decent b-sides collection and at worst like wallpaper AM radio tunes, Sloan’s eighth studio album Parallel Play fails to follow the promise of last year’s reckoning, the 30-track grand slam Never Hear The End Of It. NHTEOI was more than an acceptable apology for the two preceding discs, Pretty Together and Action Pact, albums which, in all their modern rock radio gloss and gloat, at least showed us glimpses into the changing four-headed pet monster that is Sloan. NHTEOI brought the whole together, greater than we’d yet seen the sum of their parts, then they gotta go and drop this disjointed yawnzo bomb on us? Dang.

Using a psychology concept (referring to children who play side by side with nary an interaction) for the album title makes me hope they know they’re being stubborn children this time around; each wanting to exert their own personality (Patrick likes guitars, Andrew likes Frank Black, Jay likes pop records, Chris likes Chris) and get full attention for it, but somehow I mostly just picture a comfortable-to-a-fault old married couple who co-exist in habit, knives scraping the dinner plates as they finish another meal, another day, another record.

Of course I’m not so disappointed that I won’t listen to this record a lot this summer; I mean, it is a Sloan record. I hold them to unfair levels of expectations, just like any good parent would to a child whose potential shouldn’t go to waste. (I believe that is, like Parallel Play, another ultra scientific term called “tough love.”) The thing is, this weird little bump of a record won’t win any new fans (no hit singles here), and it will likely, ahem, underwhelm other faithfuls. What now, Sloan? (Murderecords)