Only five? That must be a common lament, when 228 music writers, bloggers and broadcasters receive their annual Polaris Prize ballot, with five spaces for each voter’s choice of the best Canadian albums of the year ending May 31. But only five isn’t nearly as harsh as just one, which is where this process will end when the 2011 Polaris winner is announced in September. Till then, there are two rounds of voting and a long and short list of nominees, revealed at intervals to ratchet up the suspense. Here are three voters’ thoughts on who should make the first cut, which will be announced on June 16:
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN’S PICKS:
Castlemusic by Jennifer Castle: Castle’s main subject in this short intense album is nothing less than the mystery of life and death, and the sharp but fluid space that lies between. The songs are simple, the performances deeply resonant, and haunted by memory.
Disaster Fantasies by Selina Martin: She alone survived to tell the tale, and it’s told with humour and force, while the nostrils tingle at the smell of blood still running fresh from a wound that may never close. A great record from one of the most overlooked talents in Canadian music.
Native Speaker by Braids: This Calgary quartet, now based in Montreal, makes music the way the sea handles water, by overlapping simple elements to produce overwhelming effects. Its buoyant debut album of urban electronic folk songs feels timeless yet startling, like a field holler bursting from the metropolis.
Femmes de Chez Nous by Christine Fellows: Personal and historical narratives flow together in Fellows’s album-long séance, written while in residence at a Winnipeg heritage building where Louis Riel went to school. A poetic, rustic yet sophisticated collection of superb new songs.
The Suburbs by Arcade Fire: The band that once sang of innocence eternal follows the worm of experience into the apple of our lives, and sees no way back to a freer state that may have been an illusion. The Suburbs is a deeply felt, wisely ambivalent take on past, present and the lies we live by.
BRAD WHEELER’S PICKS
Small Source of Comfort by Bruce Cockburn: If a Bruce Cockburn album falls in a Polaris forest, does anybody hear? Probably not, which is a shame, because the man’s latest is colourful, dynamic and awfully listenable.
Sleep Beneath the Willow by Daniel Romano: A dreamy homage to a bygone country-music era – an antidote to new country.
Oh Little Fire by Sarah Harmer: Graceful and a little spunky, Sarah Harmer writes the heck out of her songs.
20 Odd Years by Buck 65: I really like the latest albums from Gord Downie and Jenn Grant, but here those two and others lend their voices and spirits generously with the mad beat-scientist from Nova Scotia.
Le Noise by Neil Young: A guy with a guitar and an amplifier – and, oh yeah, Daniel Lanois as producer.
CARL WILSON’S PICKS
Kaputt by Destroyer: No musical form’s ever suited the sly, standup-surrealist verbal riffs of Vancouver’s Dan Bejar like this record’s Quiet Storm synth groove, a flirtation with the kitsch abyss that’s like seeing someone do the Hustle on the lip of a volcano.
Ravedeath, 1972 by Tim Hecker: Recordings of an Icelandic pipe organ are degraded and distended in a noise battle that doubles as allegory for the tension between musical ideas and the technologies used to realize them: The cover (prize-worthy in itself) is a vintage photo of a gang of students pushing a piano off a roof.
New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges by Colin Stetson: Could this resettled Yank (and Arcade Fire crony) have the Polaris’s first short-listed jazz/improv album? A tour de force of exertion and invention, Stetson’s solo-sax sojourn recasts Pharoah Sanders or Roland Kirk for a more rootless age. And guest vocals from Laurie Anderson don't hurt.
At Last by Eternia & Moss: With strong female rappers in short supply, Ottawa-born Eternia evokes the old-school womanist hip-hop of Queen Latifah or MC Lyte, spitting frank bars on sex, substance abuse and self-respect over Moss’s propulsive beats.
Too Beautiful to Work by The Luyas: Half this Montreal quartet is from Bell Orchestre, including Pierre Amato, who plays the bitchin’est French horn in rock ’n’ roll. Their perpetual-motion music is indebted to Stereolab and Krautrock (with past Polaris winner Owen Pallett assisting on strings), but it’s Jessie Stein’s coy vocals that instill tender, quizzical soul.
