Polaris 2014, day three: Mac DeMarco, Owen Pallett, Hidden Cameras, Jimmy Hunt

Every day this week I'll post about two Polaris Prize shortlisted acts and two equally—if not more—worthy albums from the year in question. The winner will be announced at the gala Sept. 22.

The shortlisters:

Mac DeMarco – Salad Days (Captured Tracks)

The album: CanRock’s enfant terrible, who has been voted Most Likely to Embarrass at the gala, based on his wild-man rep as a live performer. His nonchalant attitude is a put-on, however: he’s clearly a great guitar player, even if his tone drives me up the wall. It took me a long time to be won over by Mr. DeMarco, but this album did it. Kind of.

My April review:

The term “salad days” goes back to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, where the heroine says, “My salad days,
 when I was green in judgment: cold in blood.” The 24-year-old Mac DeMarco—an Edmonton native who bounced around Vancouver and Montreal before landing in Brooklyn and becoming a buzz act—is definitely in his salad days. He is arguably green in judgment. His blood, though, is anything but cold. On this, his third full-length (second under his own name), he sounds like nothing at all could possibly raise his blood pressure: indeed, one imagines him sprawled out on a couch, guitar in hand, microphone stand carefully arranged to reach his reclined position, his rhythm section craning their necks to try and intuit changes.  

Basing this book on its cover, I had every reason to hate Mac DeMarco. Go ahead: do a Google image search. He comes off as a slacker dressed for a day at the beach in ironic retro-ugly fashion—which seems to go hand in hand with his ’80s guitar chorus pedals. At times it sounds like the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie trying to play with Pavement, or the British cloudgazing band The Clientele detuning their guitars in the middle of a song. He almost seems to intentionally be going for the weirdo vote by replicating those strange but beautiful private-press albums from the ’70s, obscurities that existed only in runs of 500 before being reissued in the 2000s with extensively researched liner notes (see: Donnie & Joe Emerson’s album Dreamin’ Wild, on Light in the Attic Records).  

If you can get past that—and it might take a while—it becomes clear that DeMarco puts a lot of effort into making music that sounds this effortless, if not, well, bad. He’s a much better guitar player than his crappy sound would suggest, and he occasionally employs unconventional harmonies (or dissonance) in otherwise dreamy (albeit slight) melodies. Every song sounds more or less the same—does that make him lazy or consistent?

Despite my initial bout of forgiveness, returning to Salad Days again is a bore. Listening to Mac DeMarco is intoxicating—as in, it makes me feel woozy and nauseous. It’s not just the guitar tone; it’s the way it balances that with the tick-ticking hi-hat and the surprisingly supple and deep bass tones (this album sounds considerably worse as an MP3: CD or vinyl, if you must).

The chances: Depends entirely on how many jurors came of age worshipping Pavement.

Owen Pallett – In Conflict (Secret City)

The album: It should be no surprise that I am a huge Owen Pallett fan. And yet: the first time I heard In Conflict, I thought: Wow, maybe this is the first time he doesn’t hit it out of the park. Maybe this is the first time he won’t make a Polaris shortlist. 

What was my problem? Was I drunk? (Alternately: was I listening to Mac DeMarco?) In Conflict is brilliant, in every respect.

I wrote about it for Maclean's here.

Fun fact: this year more people read my interview with Nico Muhly about Owen Pallett than they did my actual interview with Owen Pallett.

My May review:

Love’s beginning. Love’s end. Infatuation. Divorce. Birth. Death. Taking control. Losing control. Surely there have been thousands of songs written for every one of these situations.  But how many songs have ever been written with a line about “the day that you find your 30s have left you childless”—especially a song that rocks as hard as Owen Pallett’s uncharacteristically Zeppelinesque “The Riverbed”? Who else would dare to set a line like “I’ll never have any children” to a sunny chorus amidst an otherwise mournful chord progression (“I Am Not Afraid”)?

Just as becoming a parent is so obviously a life-changing event—there’s no shortage of songs about that, either—realizing that you’re likely never going to be a parent is surely one of the most emotional experiences of one’s life. Yet Pallett is, to my knowledge, the only person—straight or queer—to face that head on in a song.  

The 34-year-old songwriter, violinist, Arcade Fire sideman and Academy Award-nominated film composer (in 2013, for Spike Jonze’s Her) has avoided autobiography his entire career. Instead, he wrote concept albums loosely related to Dungeons and Dragons’ schools of magic and a fantastical 14th-century world called Heartland. Having been raised on ’90s female singer-songwriters, he resented the common assumption that their so-called “confessional” writing was thereby devoid of craft.

His fourth album finds him, as always, avoiding literal lyrics; even though it is (we’re told) a personal record, it’s still couched in poetry open to interpretation. Without knowing Pallett intimately, there’s nothing here that wouldn’t suggest these are universally resonant narratives. He always gets props for his musical prowess; here, Pallett’s poetry is as evocative as his music has always been.  

That’s not the only way the 2006 Polaris Prize-winner has topped himself. Everything about In Conflict marks a maturation. For starters, his voice: Pallett has always been (unnecessarily) self-conscious about his reedy timbre and somewhat limited range, but his performance here is completely transformative. Not only is he far more commanding as a vocalist, he’s writing melodies that push him to be even better; I’m not sure he’d have been able to sing a song with the melodic reach of “The Sky Behind the Flag” five years ago—at least not as well as he nails it here.  

As someone who until recently performed with only a violin and looping pedals, Pallett retreats from the full-blown orchestration that marked 2010’s Heartland. Here, he plays just as much synth as he does violin or viola. The orchestration is employed sparingly, and therefore far more effectively, never more so than the weeping, occasionally dissonance that colours “The Passions,” or the Ligeti-esque strings on the title track, cascading over the second half of an otherwise bouncy pop song.  

Key to the album’s success are collaborators old and new. Marquee value goes to Brian Eno, whose work for game-changing artists and stadium rockers with avant-garde ambitions is well known. Pallett is less interested in any of those people; he prefers Eno’s first four solo albums, before he started making largely ambient music and taking big production gigs. Eno doesn’t produce In Conflict; Pallett hired him to sing backing vocals, and Eno added some synth and guitar textures for good measure. You know, just another guy in the band. No big deal.  

Here, the real star supporting player is drummer Rob Gordon. Ten years ago, Gordon and Matt Smith were two-thirds of Les Mouches, a band where Pallett played guitar and alternated between intimate whispers and primal screams. Clearly, their chemistry is still intact; they all share writing credits on half the album. Pallett abandoned an early version of the album to re-record with his old band live in a room, which brings out a visceral side of the violinist never before heard on his recordings. Gordon in particular is every bit a virtuoso as Pallett; his drum kit is arguably the lead instrument on “The Riverbed” and “Infernal Fantasy.” Smith’s bass adds a bottom end never before heard on a Pallett platter.  

Owen Pallett is no longer the guy who plays looped solo violin. He’s no longer the guy whose lyrics seem sprung from Yukio Mishima and Ursula K. LeGuin books. He’s certainly much more than an Arcade Fire sideman, even if that’s how he’ll have spent 90 per cent of his time in 2014. With In Conflict, Pallett invests a lifetime of experience and creates his definitive work to date. 

The chances: Not bad.

Owen Pallett won the first-ever Polaris in 2006, with his Final Fantasy album He Poos Clouds. I not-so-secretly hope that for the sake of the prize's reptuation, no artist will win it twice in its first 10-year history—even if I thought Caribou’s 2010 Swim was far superior to his 2008 prizewinning Andorra, and yes, even if I think In Conflict is the best album on this shortlist.

Heck: Britain’s Mercury Prize, on which Polaris is partially modelled, has only had one repeat winner in its 22-year history. Even then, PJ Harvey took home the prize 10 years apart (in 2001 and 2011).

The GIller Prize, to which Polaris also looked to for inspiration, has had two repeat winners in its 20-year history: Alice Munro and M.G. Vassanji. Both repeated their win in fewer than 10 years. (Munro later withdrew her work for consideration for future Gillers.)

In Conflict is not only Pallett’s finest hour, it’s also his most accessible, I would argue: a good gateway for anyone who couldn’t quite find an entry point beforehand. That could give him a shot—but I wouldn’t count on it.

The could’ve been, should’ve beens:

Hidden Cameras – Age (Outside)

The album: Most people familiar with Hidden Cameras are of two minds. Either they always though them some kind of juvenile, niche novelty, or they are fans who treat them as a time capsule from a certain time and place (i.e. Torontopia, circa 2003). Too bad: Joel Gibb will always have thematic threads in his writing, but he’s no longer out to be deliberately provocative; the guy is 37 years old—he’s a grown man. Age, the album, shows that he’s not at all past his prime: he’s getting better.

Maybe I wrote this band off for several years for a variety of reasons, personal and otherwise, but mostly because neither Awoo nor Origin:Orphan did much for me. Here, Gibb is writing the kind of melodies that first drew me into his world, while the band around him and the production is exponentially better. The vintage Hidden Cameras “gay church folk music” sound is there, alongside strangely successful forays into dub reggae and Depeche Mode worship. Usually there’s at least a clunker or two on a Hidden Cameras album; this album is happily all killer, no filler.

My January review for The Grid: 

The fact that a new Hidden Cameras album exists, five years since the last, and eons since bandleader Joel Gibb decamped from Toronto for Berlin, isn’t the most surprising thing about Age. That would be the dub reggae track “Afterparty,” which works far better than you’d ever imagine: The sparse backdrop is just as suited to Gibb’s soaring vocals as his usual reverb-drenched guitar music. Gibb also takes some long-overdue steps into slinky synth grooves, hardly shocking for anyone who expected him to eventually evolve from delightful lo-fi amateurism into electronic textures. Yet Age is anything but a series of left turns. Each musical element that made the Cameras’ initial burst of “gay church folk music” so exciting—simple, long-note folk melodies set to four chords and an insistent, joyous rhythm—is still at the core of every track; the ever-present string section is punchier, evocative, and more effective than ever. Most importantly, there isn’t a weak track on this concise album, even if Gibb dips into a pool of old live favourites, like first single “Gay Goth Scene,” featuring a demonic possession by Mary Margaret O’Hara in the solo section. You can take the boy out of Toronto….

Why it didn’t make the long list: Again, people take either this band for granted or have them pegged as something from which Gibb and company have long since moved on. “Long-running band releases decent album” doesn’t make great headlines. I’d argue this is more than decent: it’s the most rewarding, well-rounded Hidden Cameras record ever.

Jimmy Hunt – Maladie d’amour (Grosse Boite)

The album:

My December 2013 review:

For a francophone artist from Quebec, Jimmy Hunt sounds incredibly British: particularly, the lazy, hazy dreampop tradition that weaves through early Pink Floyd to Roxy Music to Talk Talk to the Stones Roses to Stereolab. Maladie d’amour is rich with languorous late-night grooves: not surprisingly when you find out Hunt wrote and recorded the skeletons of these songs while on mushrooms in a studio on a lake in La Mauricie National Park (north of Shawinigan), and fleshed out the arrangements during 12-hour nighttime sessions in Montreal a year later. Hunt’s songs are decent, but it’s the last-minute overhaul he subjected them to that elevates the material from the merely nice to the epic and occasionally transcendent. Things get really weird on “Christian Bobin,” which sounds like an Air/Daft Punk collab with Thurston Moore on guitar. Montreal is known for being a city of dreamers; this sounds like that dream. No wonder Hunt has a song called "Rever souvent." 

Why it didn’t make the shortlist: There weren’t a lot of francophone records with serious traction this year. Only three made the long list: a folk record, a hip-hop record, and this one. He might not be reaching English audiences, but he is up for two ADISQ awards next month: Alternative Album of the Year and something called Album of the Year: Critical Acclaim. Is that the franco Polaris?

December '13 reviews

The following reviews ran in the Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury.

Highly recommended: Mark Berube, Jimmy Hunt, Kae Sun.

Recommended: Howe Gelb, Kashka, Shearwater.

Berliner Philharmoniker – Centenary Edition (Deutsche Grammophon)

For the classical music fan on your holiday shopping list, this should get you in their good books for the next, oh, I don’t know, century. The Berlin Philharmonic has been making recordings since 1913. What better way to commemorate that occasion than with a 50-CD box set encompassing the Western canon, much of it conducted by the iconic Herbert von Karajan (who led the philharmonic for 35 years), only slight nods to 20^th-century compositions, and very little that would ever be performed in a symphony orchestra’s “Pops” series of light classical concerts.

Needless to say, the fidelity of the recordings increases considerably over the course of a century. The only knock against this comprehensive set is that no amount of digital mastering technique can compensate for the primitive recordings of the first decade: folk, blues and jazz music of that time still sounds decent, but the power and majesty of an orchestra this size is entirely lost. That all changed by the time Karajan took charge: he was a vocal champion of stereo recordings in the ’60s and the shift to compact discs in the early ’80s.

Obviously the Berlin Philharmonic’s output is even greater than what is here—for starters, they recorded for labels other than Deutsche Grammophon. But they’ve cherry-picked the best for this set, which sells for $110—just over $2 a CD (it’s actually more expensive to buy it digitally). Stuff that in your stocking. (Dec. 12)

Mark Berube – Russian Dolls (Bonsound)

This Montreal-via-Vancouver-via Brandon songwriter came out of the gate with a very promising debut, 2008’s What the River Gave the Boat, that set him up as a classically trained cabaret pop singer whose boho beauty seemed destined to soundtrack Montreal tourism ads. His records since have been interesting, at least, but here he seriously steps up his game. His bandmates—cellist Kristina Koropecki, bassist Amélie Mandeville and drummer Tonio Morin-Vargas—are integral parts of every song’s arrangement, and producer Jace Lasek of the Besnard Lakes lets his clients run rampant with ancient synths and gives the material the widescreen berth it deserves. Berube belongs in the same ballpark as Patrick Watson and Rufus Wainwright, but there’s nothing on Russian Dolls that sounds like he’s anything but a complete original. Now that he has one of Quebec’s most successful indie labels behind him and an album more than worthy of his many talents. (Dec. 5)

Download: “Carnival,” “Ethiopia,” “Queen and Country”

Blood Orange – Cupid Deluxe (Domino)

Listening to the underrated Kae Sun and the overrated Blood Orange in the same week is depressing. There’s no question that Devonté Hynes is a talented producer: his work on Solange’s breakthrough EP and his dead-on impression of early ’80s Prince and Hall & Oates records on this, his second album as Blood Orange. He’s not the only one mining that territory in 2013: Haim, for one, do it far better—though Blood Orange does trump the even worse Twin Shadow in this same genre. For Hynes, production values don’t compensate for limp songs; everything here is puddle-deep, every smooth sax solo a reminder of what we’ve all tried to forget about the ’80s (Destroyer somehow pulled off  sax-cheese thing. Throwing in James Brown’s once-ubiquitous “Funky Drummer” sample on "Clipped On" is not only retro, it speaks to how unnecessary this entire album feels. (Dec. 12)

Download: “Chamakay,” “Uncle Ace,” “You’re Not Good Enough”

Howe Gelb – The Coincidentalist (New West)

Howe Gelb has legions of disciples across North America and Europe, all drawn to the mysterious musician and his scattershot approach to recording and performing, constantly veering the steering wheel onto yet another dusty back road, not giving a damn who’s following him. “How did I get so lucky?” he asks on one song here, his umpteenth album in the past 30 years (and second this year alone). Well, because for every five albums full of genius hidden underneath throwaway, improvised sketches of half-baked songs, he’ll pull something like The Coincidentalist out of his hat (see also: The Listener, Sno Angel Like You, Chore of Enchantment).

Some of his high-profile comrades show up here: M. Ward (She and Him), KT Tunstall, Bonnie Prince Billy, Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth. But they are all minor players in Gelb’s domain; his charisma fills every track on this concise and oddly focused—for Gelb—album of Leonard Cohen-esque balladry, heat-baked Arizona Americana, jazz flourishes and weirdo piano bar blues with titles like “An Extended Plane of Existence.” Gelb is self-aware enough to know what friends and foes think of him, in both the title track and on “Pichacho Peak,” where he sings: “I got one hand on the wheel / one’s holding my coffee / and I’m still holding the phone talking to you / I hope to remain so severely talented / least for another mile or two.”

That’s never in question. Whether it all coalesces into a cohesive album is always a crapshoot; The Coincidentalist is one of those glorious, rare moments when Howe Gelb hits a home run. (Dec. 5)

Download: “Vortexas,” “Triangulate,” “Pichacho Peak”

Jimmy Hunt – Maladie d’amour (Grosse Boite)

For a francophone artist from Quebec, Jimmy Hunt sounds incredibly British: particularly, the lazy, hazy dreampop tradition that weaves through early Pink Floyd to Roxy Music to Talk Talk to the Stones Roses to Stereolab. Maladie d’amour is rich with languorous late-night grooves: not surprisingly when you find out Hunt wrote and recorded the skeletons of these songs while on mushrooms in a studio on a lake in La Mauricie National Park, and fleshed out the arrangements during 12-hour nighttime sessions in Montreal a year later. Hunt’s songs are decent, but it’s the last-minute overhaul he subjected them to that elevates the material from the merely nice to the epic and occasionally transcendent. Things get really weird on “Christian Bobin,” which sounds like an Air/Daft Punk collab with Thurston Moore on guitar. Montreal is known for being a city of dreamers; this sounds like that dream. No wonder Hunt has a song called "Rever souvent." (Dec. 12)

Download: “Nos Corps,” “Marie-Marthe,” “Christian Bobin”

Kae Sun – Afriyie (Urbnet)

This album came out in May—where was I hiding?—but clearly it’s never too late to champion this grossly underrated Toronto singer. Born in Ghana, raised in Canada, Kae Sun may well be the best male R&B singer in Canada. Sure, The Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye has a lot of Michael Jackson in him, but Kae Sun—who’s more of a Sam Cooke guy—has a three-dimensional range. His music is thoroughly modern, rich with electronic textures and borrowing from soul, reggae and pop grooves, but that voice could sell you an entire a cappella album should he so choose. Opening track “Blackstar Rising” is nothing short of stunning; should this make it on to radio, it would literally stop you in your tracks were you to hear it in public. Sometimes he’s as poppy as Miguel, sometimes as dark and dubby as Massive Attack, and on only one occasion does he fully embrace his African roots. Production values throughout are top-notch; nothing about Afriyie sounds like an independent release. Kae Sun is an enormous talent: it’s literally incredible that this record didn’t make huge waves in 2013, either in Toronto, Canada or beyond. (Dec. 12)

Download: “Blackstar Rising,” “Ship and the Globe,” “Weh-Weh”

Kashka – Bound (Independent)

When Kat Burns disbanded her long-running Forest City Lovers earlier this year, it closed a chapter on one of the most underrated acts to emerge from the fertile southwestern Ontario scene of the 2000s. Burns had already kickstarted her solo project, Kashka, as an all-electronic project with Jamie Bunton of Ohbijou. Their debut recordings didn’t hold a candle to the spellbinding, understated magic of Forest City Lovers: was Burns making a tragic mistake?

Chalk that debut up to growing pains, because Bound recaptures Burns’s strengths as a singer and songwriter, with electronics only one part of her new palette, and her musical horizons having been expanded considerably wider than anything else she’s done to date would suggest. Beneath Burns’s pleasant voice is often a harsh lyrical truth; as welcoming as the music is, everything is hardly hunky dory under the surface. It’s typical of Burns to set her most buoyant pop song to lyrics about a relationship full of nothing but regret, with lyrics like, “Maybe I was a fool to think that I could fight off my denial,” followed by a chorus of: “Maybe we never had it anyway.”

Burns is not a powerhouse vocalist; she doesn’t write obvious hooks; there’s no intriguing backstory. All of which is to her disadvantage when trying to separate herself from every other indie act trying to carve out space in the crowded Toronto scene. And yet we underestimate her at our own peril. (Dec. 5)

Download: “Never Had It,” “We Let the Shadow In” (feat. Neil Haverty of Bruce Peninsula), “Maybe It’s Time”

Shearwater - Fellow Travelers (Sub Pop)

Let’s say you’re a respected but generally underrated band who often tours with other respected but generally underrated bands—and occasionally the totally overrated superstar band that offers you a hand up by taking you on as an opening act. Wouldn’t it be frustrating to hear so many great songs every night on said tours, knowing that only fans of Obscure Band X would ever hear them?

Fellow Travelers is a love letter from Texas band Shearwater to their many peers they’ve toured with over the past 12 years. By covering those artists’ songs, it doesn’t sound that much different than any other Shearwater album—somewhere between histrionic agit-art-rockers Xiu Xiu and Coldplay and esoteric post-grunge indie rockers Wye Oak, with shades of ’70s British folk (a tradition continued here by David Thomas Broughton). It speaks to Shearwater’s strengths that they make the disparate source material work as a coherent whole: with the possible exception of Folk Implosion’s freak ’90s dance pop hit “Natural One” (which is perhaps too faithful to the original), singer Jonathan Meiburg owns all of this material: the fact that the Coldplay cover doesn’t sound at all out of place with the Xiu Xiu song speaks volumes.

It’s a total win-win situation—bringing out the best in Shearwater, and highlighting their peers—and kind of remarkable that more people don’t do this instead of obvious gimmickry (hey, let’s cover Dark Side of the Moon!) or, God forbid, yet another Christmas album (which, as a matter of policy, this column refuses to review). (Dec. 5)

Download: “Natural One” (Folk Implosion), “I Luv the Valley OH!” (Xiu Xiu), “Fucked Up Life” (Baptist Generals)