Pre-Polaris, day four: Tobias Jesso Jr., New Pornographers

The 10^th Polaris Music Prize gala is next Monday, Sept. 21, at the Carlu in Toronto, where 11 jurors locked in a room will decide which one of these 10 artists will get $50,000 and a gig with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 2016. All other nominees receive $3,000.

Every day this week I’ll look at two of the shortlisted albums, assess their chances, and celebrate two albums that didn’t make the short list—or, in some cases, even the long list.

Day one is here; day two is here; day three is here. And a whole bunch of relatively unnecessary distractions are here and here.

Tobias Jesso Jr. – Goon (Arts and Crafts)

The album:

  

From my April review:

  

The 1970s in California produced dozens of top-notch songwriters: some famous, some not-so-famous, many of which are rediscovered by subsequent generations, and revisited by young songwriters. The latest of the newbies is Tobias Jesso, Jr., a 29-year-old Vancouver native who retreated home after four years in L.A., only to write songs that suddenly got attention from the calibre of people he’d been trying to impress for years. So here we are, with a debut album of piano ballads for sad sacks on sunny days, produced by John Collins (New Pornographers, Destroyer), the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, and the man behind hits by Vampire Weekend and Haim (Ariel Rechtshaid), released by Broken Social Scene’s Arts and Crafts label.

  

I didn’t have much more to say about this album then, and I still don’t. It’s so featherweight that I can’t imagine anyone getting riled up and arguing passionately why it deserves $50,000. The first track is nice: “Can’t Stop Thinking About You”? Well, if “you” means Elliott Smith, then yes, I can’t stop thinking about how much I’d rather be listening to XO right now. The one about how “everyone lies in Hollywood” also strikes a chord: “I don’t know if I can make it / and I don’t know if I should.” Hey buddy, you said it.

OK, to be fair, Jesso obviously has talent, but this debut is super green. I have no idea what it’s doing here.

The chances: Non-existent.

New Pornographers – Brill Bruisers (Last Gang)

The album:

  

This was a shocker. Not because the New Pornographers aren’t a great band; they are. Not because this isn’t a great album; it’s one of their better ones (but definitely not their best). But I don’t recall any great critical outpouring greeting its release; being Canadians, we take bands like this for granted. “Oh right, that band with A.C. Newman and Dan Bejar and Neko Case and Kathryn Calder and Kurt Dahle one of Canada’s best producers on bass. Are they still around?” (Well, Dahle split after this record.)

The last album fans all agreed was fantastic was 2005’s Twin Cinema (I loved 2010’s Together, but it was pooh-poohed in most Brill Bruisers reviews), so maybe the 10-year gap renewed our collective appreciation for a solid Pornographers record—which this most definitely is. “Champions of Red Wine” is a total earworm that I had in my head most of last fall. Bejar’s “War on the East Coast” is easily one of his best melodies he’s written for this band (and there’s been quite a few). The keyboards of Blaine Thurier and Kathryn Calder (as heard on her fine 2015 solo release) are brought to the forefront, competing with the chugging guitars and sounding more modern than the new wave throwbacks of earlier albums. And, as has been the case on recent albums, the four- and five-part harmonies and shared lead vocals have supplanted the one-singer, one-song model that made this band seem like a bizarre variety show. The Bejar-Calder duet on “Born With a Sound” is sublime [update: I've since learned this is actually Black Mountain's Amber Webber, not Calder; I have no liner notes!], and unexpected (and rather Arcade Fire-ish; Calder [actually Webber] sounds a bit like Régine Chassagne here).

My August 2014 review is here.

The chances:

Zilch. Other than Feist’s 2012 win for Metals—an album I love intensely, but that got a lukewarm reception upon release, and was considered to be a curiosity from an artist ever-so-slightly past her prime—Polaris jurors aren’t usually the sentimental type. We’ve all grown up with this band. We still love this band. But can they still blow us away? Also: Vancouver. Don’t discount the central Canadian conspiracy that has clearly cast a curse on West Coast artists at Polaris.

Two of the should’ve, could’ve beens:

Terra Lightfoot – Every Time My Mind Runs Wild (Sonic Unyon)

The album:

Holy cow, what a barn-burner. This is the sound of an artist waking up and deciding to grab life by the balls and live every moment to the fullest. How often do you hear that?

  

My April review:

There’s lots to love about Hamiltonian Terra Lightfoot’s second album: her songwriting has improved tenfold; she’s got a roaring rock band behind her; she’s steeped in the most durable elements of classic rock, country and Americana, and her music is exactly what you (okay, me, at least) want to hear when you hit the bar on Friday night.  But records like that are a dime a dozen. Lightfoot has something else going for her. Everyone, it seems, loves a man who sings like a woman. And everyone loves a woman who dresses like one of the guys on stage. But what of the woman in a dress with a masculine—or, at the very least, androgynous—voice? It’s not just that Lightfoot has a lower range, it’s the timbre of her voice that sounds like no one else, male or female. She’s the Alison Moyet of Canadian roots rock. It’s what makes or breaks her appeal; it doesn’t leave anyone sitting on the fence, especially when she hangs onto notes at the climax of a chorus ("No Hurry"). Producer Gus Van Go (Whitehorse) pushes her to go big or go home; even the sparsely arranged ballads here (“NFB,” “Splinter”) don’t shy away from big, brassy moments—and she pulls it off every time.  That approach applies not just to her voice: this is Lightfoot putting all (or most) of her cards on the table. Opening with a rollicking electric waltz, she frontloads the album with rockers before branching out to tender folk songs or a 1950s 6/8 shuffle or two-step country. Every Time My Mind Runs Wild is brimming with confidence, a calling card for a young artist more than ready to make her mark.

  

Why it didn’t even make the long list:

  

Her debut album was barely noticed; this one came out in late April and word of mouth started spreading slowly—as did radio play. Come the summertime, she was the talk of festival season. Now that it’s September, it looks like Polaris voters really missed the boat. No matter—she’s already onward and upward, not looking back.

Tre Mission – Stigmata (Big Dada)

  

The album:

This Toronto MC and producer was one of the most exciting things I heard last year. His charisma and flow as an MC are solid and better than most, but it’s the production here that really stands out. Signed to Ninja Tune subsidiary Big Dada, his ties to British hip-hop, particularly its grime scene, run deep. For Tre Mission, grime is an excuse to blow open boundaries and create futuristic, next-level hip-hop that challenges any cutting-edge electronic artist. Of course, that can also be said of Drake and Kanye, for example, but for whatever reason this music resonates with me more: it’s much more animated, limber and playful than Drake, it’s more sparse, atmospheric and dub-influenced than Kanye. It shares plenty with my other favourite new Toronto MC/producer, Keita Juma, who got lost in this year’s discussion but whose new work I’m looking forward to. For a 23-year-old on his second album, Tre Mission is remarkably accomplished and fully formed. And in a singles-driven genre, Stigmata holds up from top to bottom. I can’t wait to hear what he does next: on his own, or producing other people, or whatever the hell he wants. And I hope to God Canada doesn’t sleep on it.

Why it didn’t make the short list:

Plenty—though not nearly enough—hip-hop records get suggested by the jury; a handful make the long list, and usually no more than one or two make the shortlist. There’s clearly some kind of glass ceiling. This year the biggest rap star in the world and a hip-hop legend both showed up to the Polaris party, which squeezes out smaller voices. One hip-hop fan I know thought this record sounded “too British”—not sure about that, but it is markedly different than most North American hip-hop.

Polaris pondering, prior to the 2015 long list

Siskiyou - Nervous

It's almost time to submit my five-album ballot for the 2015 Polaris Music Prize. It's always hard to whittle diverse genres of music down to five albums that I'd place over all others: usually there are two or maybe three albums I think are near-perfect: encapsulations of an artist's (assumed) intent, reflecting the zeitgeist and/or something I keep coming back to again and again and hearing new delights. Then there's a bunch of very good albums that fill out the rest of my ballot. 

These are by no means all the good Canadian records released between June 1, 2014 and May 30, 2015, but these are the ones that I found completely captivating, and the ones I'm considering for my ballot. Of course, I'd love it if these 20 records composed half the long list, but my track record suggests that's not going to happen. 

And of course there are records I haven't heard: procrastinating Polaris jurors suggested no fewer than 20 albums in the last week. Frankly, I'm not going to listen to any of them I hadn't heard already—or at least not for Polaris purposes. With three exceptions (all May releases), I've been sitting with the records below for many months now. No matter what shakes down between now and the Sept. 21 gala, you should get to know them, too.

Here's my dance card, in alphabetical order:

Afiara Quartet + Skratch Bastid – Spin City (Centrediscs)

Lydia Ainsworth – Right From Real (Arbutus)

Bahamas – Is Afie (Brushfire)

Boogat – Neo-Reconquista (Maisonnette)

Jennifer Castle – Pink City (Idée Fixe)

Leonard Cohen – Popular Problems (Sony)

Ian William Craig – A Turn of Breath (Recital)

Amelia Curran – They Promised You Mercy (Six Shooter)

Keita Juma – Chaos Theory (independent)

Pierre Kwenders – Le dernier empereur bantou (Bonsound)

Daniel Lanois – Flesh and Machine (Anti)

Lee Harvey Osmond – Beautiful Scars (Latent)

Jean Leloup – A Paradis City (Grosse Boite)

Terra Lightfoot – Every Time My Mind Runs Wild (Sonic Unyon)

Native North America – Various Artists (Light in the Attic)

Sagot – Valse 333 (Simone)

Buffy Sainte-Marie – Power in the Blood (True North)

Siskiyou – Nervous (Constellation)

Tre Mission – Stigmata (Big Dada)

Whitehorse – Leave No Bridge Unburned (Six Shooter)

April 2015 reviews

Highly recommended here: Courtney Barnett

Highly recommended in earlier posts: Kendrick Lamar, Alabama Shakes

Well worth your while: Iceberg Ferg, Lee Harvey Osmond, Tre Mission

Well worth your while in earlier posts: Terra Lightfoot, Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld

Good times: C & C, Kathryn Calder, Calexico, Whitney Rose

Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Sony)

Courtney Barnett often sounds bored. That doesn’t make her music boring. The deadpan Aussie is just as likely to be rambling over a furious, garage punk stomp as she is over a languid, jazzy waltz or mid-tempo Americana, her thoughts tumbling out of her mouth, her melodies formed just as often from inflections in her voice as they are from specific notes.

Barnett is an unlikely rock star—meaning, in part, that she’s the first major-label female artist in recent history who doesn’t appear to have been sent to wardrobe and makeup. But it’s more than that. She’s seemingly a slacker stumbling into greatness (see: the album title), yet it’s precisely her nonchalance that’s most enticing—and deceptive. “Put me on a pedestal, and I’ll only disappoint you,” she howls in “Pedestrian at Best.” “Tell me I’m exceptional and I promise to exploit you.” Here we are now—entertain us.

Barnett has been open about her battles with depression. She tried medicating for a while, then decided against it, turning instead to writing and shaping her thoughts into songs. “I’m not suicidal, I’m just idling insignificantly,” she sings. Except that there’s nothing insignificant about this, her first full-length (last year’s compilation of two EPs included her breakout track, “Avant Gardener”). Barnett is confident, curious, funny and raw, and a unique, valuable voice. And her record rocks. (April 9)

Download: “Pedestrian at Best,” “Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party,” “Depreston”

C & C – Surffactory (Six Shooter)

Surf rock gets a bad name. Yes, it’s an instrumental subgenre pretty much confined to the early ’60s. Yes, it’s reliant on reverb and whammy bars and will probably always make you think of Duane Eddy or the James Bond theme or “Wipeout.”

There’s a reason why guitarists love surf rock: it’s where they get to shine not just as a lead instrument, but as the keeper of the melody, tasked with making repeated motifs interesting every time, using the most minor inflections to inject variety into an inherently limited framework. All their favourite country, blues, jazz, psychedelic and even metal tricks can be deployed judiciously.

Little surprise then, that one of Canada’s greatest guitarists of the last 30 years has taken a second stab at a solo career with this new band. Colin Cripps has played guitar with Crash Vegas, Blue Rodeo, Kathleen Edwards and others; his first album fronting his own material a couple of years ago was met with mostly crickets. Here, however, he teams up with Champagne James Robertson (a.k.a. the other “C”) from New Country Rehab and Lindi Ortega’s band, along with a rumbling rhythm section and ace producer Chris Stringer on keyboards. Together, they dive right in and start riding the waves with ease; Cripps and Robertson sound like they’ve played together for years, such is their chemistry.

The elephant in the room here is the ghost of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the wildly inventive ’80s Toronto band who pushed boundaries in the genre with a giddy irreverence and a guitarist, Brian Connelly, who had as much raw energy and guts as he did technical skill and melodic mastery—plenty. C & C are polished players, maybe a bit too much so for my tastes. Connelly is alive and well and still making music, somewhere around the corner from these guys. But the more the merrier, right? Surffactory is a rollicking, rocking good time, a band guaranteed to electrify every stage they invade this summer. (April 30)

Download: “Takeshiesque,” “Cobra Basket,” “Dirty Skirty”

Kathryn Calder – s/t (File Under: Music)

Just because she plays in a long-running, internationally acclaimed band doesn’t mean Kathryn Calder can’t be underrated. The keyboardist and singer in the New Pornographers now has three solo albums under her belt (and earlier records with her first band, Immaculate Machine), where her lovely melodies and bell-clear voice are surrounded by striking and occasionally dense layers of sound. On this and her previous record, that sound has been crafted with help from her husband, Colin Stewart, one of the most talented producers and sound sculptors in Canada or elsewhere (Dan Mangan, Black Mountain, Veda Hille, Yukon Blonde). With his other clients, Stewart usually tacks to a more straightforward approach; with Calder, both of their imaginations run wild.  

It’s been four years since 2011’s Bright and Vivid—which received merely a perfunctory amount of attention, like its predecessor, 2009’s Are You My Mother?—and there’s a reason for the gap: there’s a lost album in between. Calder’s first two records were informed by the loss of both her parents in succession; after Bright and Vivid she wrote and recorded an album’s worth of songs taking stock of her life. Then she scrapped it. She felt like she was just going through the motions. What we hear here began with synths and loops in the home studio she shares with Stewart.

That explains why texture triumphs over songcraft here. Calder will always be a melodic songwriter, of course, but the songs this time out sound like sketches onto which she and Stewart paint with aural watercolours. On the rare occasion they throw a strong rhythm track underneath (“Take a Little Time”), pleasant shades of Stereolab start to surface. Mostly, however, they’re happily lost in their own sound world, somewhere by the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by possibility. (April 16)

Download: “Beach,” “Take a Little Time,” “My Armour”

Calexico – Edge of the Sun (Anti)

Another Calexico album—their eighth—and another round of ponderous reviews about how exactly the desert and Arizona landscape informs its music. Which is true, of course. And there are precious few American acts nominally described as “rock” that incorporate Latino influences as effectively as Calexico—which is, frankly, weird, considering the demographics of the U.S. Turns out that country’s not exactly a melting pot after all.

The state of Calexico, however, is. There are the expected mariachi and cumbia influences, but also a shade of Jamaican rock steady, an appearance by the Greek band Takim, weeping pedal steel guitars, experimental sounds just beneath the surface, and cameos from old friends Neko Case, Sam Beam of Iron and Wine, and Nick Urata from Devotchka. Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno and Ben Bridwell from Band Of Horses join the cast because, well, the more the merrier. This band has always operated as more of a social club than an island.

After the mildly disappointing 2012 album Algiers, where Calexico appeared to be smoothing over any remaining rough edges, Edge of the Sun returns to the eclecticism that made modern classics out of 2003’s Feast of Wire or 2008’s Carried to Dust. Is it just more of the same, then? Sure—as much as you could ever say that about a band with this level of musical curiosity. (April 16)

Download: “Tapping on the Line,” “Chinchon Ciudad del Sueno,” “Moon Never Rises”

Gonzales – Chambers (Gentle Threat)

Chilly Gonzales: The man who helped shape Feist’s songs into the classics they became, the man called upon by Daft Punk and Drake to add a touch of class to blockbuster albums, the self-declared musical genius who became an unlikely star in France with an album of tiny, perfect solo piano vignettes.

Gonzales used to want to be a pop star himself, but by following up his Solo Piano II album with this, another instrumental album, this time featuring strings alongside his piano, he seems content to let the grand gestures go to his collaborators while he focuses on his neo-classical reputation: no less than the Royal Conservatory of Music has commissioned him to write new work for them, and he’s published a book of etudes and released instructional videos.

Lately, however, Gonzales has been more interesting to discuss, or to interview, than to listen to. Chambers is perfectly pleasant and features some of the melodic elements that made Solo Piano so compelling, but it doesn’t come close to matching Gonzales’s visions of his own grandeur. If he’s going to set such high standards for himself, he should try to meet them. Closing with the album’s sole vocal track, he puns and lisps while he promises that “you’re going to myth me.” Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe next time. (April 9)

Download: “Advantage Points,” “Solitaire,” “Sample This”

Iceberg Ferg – Waiting On (independent)

Who is Iceberg Ferg? Most people on this side of the Strait of Georgia have no idea. He’s a solo artist from Victoria who made this album in a cabin on Pender Island and … that’s all I got. He’s a local secret, beloved by the local campus radio station and programmers for Calgary’s Sled Island festival, but that’s it. Ferg is a finger-picking guitarist with a falsetto voice who moves between straight-up acoustic blues and folk to reverb-drenched, lo-fi psychedelic pop songs, falling somewhere between Chad Van Gaalen and the guy from Canned Heat, with a bit of the outsider weirdness of Willis Earl Beal. It’s haunting, arresting and completely engaging. Part of me wants to know a lot more about him and where this music comes from; part of me believes that fragile beauty like this is best left unexplained. (April 30)

Download: “Let’s Make It Real,” “All Night Long,” “Stranger As the Days Go By”

Tobias Jesso Jr. – Goon (Arts and Crafts)

The 1970s in California produced dozens of top-notch songwriters: some famous, some not-so-famous, many of which are rediscovered by subsequent generations, and revisited by young songwriters. The latest is Tobias Jesso, Jr., a 29-year-old Vancouver native who retreated home after four years in L.A., only to write songs that suddenly got attention from the calibre of people he’d been trying to impress for years. So here we are, with a debut album of piano ballads for sad sacks on sunny days, produced by John Collins (New Pornographers, Destroyer), the Black Keys’ Patrick Karney, and the man behind hits by Vampire Weekend and Haim (Ariel Rechtshaid), released by Broken Social Scene’s Arts and Crafts label.

Naturally, it sounds great—on the surface. A songwriter’s album has to have great songs, however, and here Jesso sounds like a green lightweight who needs more time to cut his teeth. The songs are pleasant, but, with few exceptions, hardly memorable; the lyrics never leap out at you. On top of that, his own piano playing sounds clunky and forced. Jesso might have a lot of heavyweights in his corner, but he doesn’t sound quite ready for prime time. (April 2)

Download: “Can’t Stop Thinking About You,” “Hollywood,” “For You”

Lee Harvey Osmond – Beautiful Scars (Latent)

Are scars beautiful? I’m sure the scarred rarely feel that way. But the older we get, the more wisdom we gain, and hopefully we learn to love who we are, no matter the emotional or physical beatings we’ve endured. I don’t know if Hamilton singer/songwriter Tom Wilson (Junkhouse, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings) has any actual physical scars, but he sings like he’s rode a few emotional rollercoasters in his time. This is Wilson’s third album as Lee Harvey Osmond, a collaboration with Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins and the Skydiggers’ Josh Finlayson, in which Wilson leaves his loud guitars behind and digs into spooky blues and the underbelly of the Canadian folk tradition, with jazzy horns and flutes, weeping pedal steel guitar (courtesy of the masterful Aaron Goldstein), haunting vibraphones and beatnik hand percussion. More than a few hellhounds appear to be on his tail.

Ever since this project’s inception, Wilson’s been churning out the best songs of his career (and cherry-picking from his past, as he does here with the title track of his 2001 album Planet Love), letting his luxuriously rich baritone wrap itself around tales of regret, mystery and renewal. It’s a bit odd that Timmins’s sparse arrangements here surpass those heard on recent Cowboy Junkies records; while that band moved on, for better or worse, it’s Lee Harvey Osmond who has inherited the lessons learned from the first two Junkies records.

There’s nothing about Beautiful Scars that’s any better or worse or different than 2010’s A Quiet Evil or 2013’s The Folk Sinner—there’s no need. Wilson and Timmins have hit a groove and they’re making some of the best music of their career. And the longer they do it, the more records they make that sound like this, it won’t seem like an odd side project—but instead one of the greatest Canadian bands of the last 10 years. (April 9)

Download: “Blue Moon Drive,” “Shake the Hand,” “Black Spruce”

Whitney Rose – Heartbreaker of the Year (Cameron House)

Charlottetown native Whitney Rose is getting a lot of attention for this, her second album, because it was produced by Raul Malo of Miami’s legendary Mavericks, one of the most commercially and critically successfully country bands of the past 20 years. Malo is an undeniably talented and classy guy, and his word goes a long way. His band provides the rhythm section here. But the big names in the room all pale next to the sweet songbird voice of Ms. Rose, who would have no problem blowing away audiences all on her lonesome.

She’s not lonely here, however. In addition to the Mavericks, she has some of Toronto’s finest players: guitarist Nichol Robertson (who put out an underrated instrumental record a few years back; he also plays in Devin Cuddy’s band), pedal steel guitarist Burke Carroll (whose resumé is too long to list) and violinist Drew Jurecka (Jill Barber).

The production, players, and especially Rose’s voice all shine. The songs aren’t as strong, and covers of Phil Spector and Hank Williams seem superfluous, even when Malo duets with her on “Be My Baby.” But there’s no doubt that Rose is bound for the big time. (April 30)

Download: “Heartbreaker of the Year,” “My First Rodeo,” “The Devil Borrowed My Boots”

Tre Mission – Stigmata (Big Dada/Ninja Tune)

It’s hard enough for Canadian hip-hop MCs to get noticed in America; rarer still is the MC signed to a British label. In this case, it’s Big Dada, home to Roots Manuva, Young Fathers and Wiley. (They’ve also put out records by Canucks Cadence Weapon and Thunderheist.) This debut by Toronto’s Tre Mission came out months ago, but despite some favourable notices and a Juno nomination, it’s safe to say that it’s still flying far beneath the radar.

Shame, then: Tre Mission has immense skill and flow, and easily carves out his own niche in this country. That’s because he grew up listening to U.K. grime, a hip-hop style that never really caught on in North America but is still thriving there; scene veteran Wiley took Tre Mission under his wing, on tour, and guests here, as do other Brits. But Tre gets hometown love too: Saukrates and K-OS also drop by.

Most impressive, though, is Tre’s production: he’s a master beatmaker, with depth and texture framing the melodies underneath his rhymes. He’s versatile, too: some tracks here could go pop, while others are rooted in underground sounds. Stigmata would be just as compelling as an entirely instrumental album; if for whatever reason his flows fall on deaf ears, he easily has a backup plan as a producer for others. (April 23)

Download: “Real Grind,” “On Road,” “Boy in the Corner”