Pre-Polaris, day three: Jennifer Castle, Drake

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.

  

Jennifer Castle – Pink City (Idée Fixe)

The album:

One of two albums I’m rooting for this year (the only two from my ballot that made it). It’s also an album I almost tossed after the first time I heard it; I didn’t understand Jennifer Castle before and wasn’t sure this time would be any different. And yet, this is the Polaris album I keep returning to again and again, hearing new lyrics, new textures, appreciating her melodies and chords in new ways.  

An excerpt from my November 2014 review:

… Her voice is in full focus: every quiver, every time she slides between notes, the full body of her lower register. Castle’s music sounds like it was made in isolation, crafted in a remote Appalachian (or Algonquin) cabin (“I don’t need a home / don’t need a lover / I’ll be out on my own / come hell or high water”). Though rooted in folk forms, she doesn’t always follow familiar refrains, chord patterns or consistent tempos; many of her instrumental voicings and melodies owe more of a debt to jazz. Then there’s her voice itself: part Mary Margaret O’Hara, part Vashti Bunyan, a folkie flower child sounding alternately lost and innocent or wise and weary. In her left-field approach to folk, she also recalls Nick Drake, who used jazz players and stood far apart from his contemporaries. (She does not, however, sound like Nick Drake.) Though it was her solo performance I found so striking, Pink City is very delicately decorated with subtle touches from players careful not to tread on her unique talent.

Listening again closely now, what stands out is the judicious use of those guest players, most of whom are used to add one specific colour to a given track: one song features duelling flute solos, one song features pedal steel guitar prominently, one features harmonica, the title track features sublime saxophone work by Brodie West, fluttering around Castle’s vocal melody. Owen Pallett’s string arrangements are minimal but highly effective. Setting her apart from most folkies is Castle's use of directed tempos; this is not a click-track record, which makes the ornamentation that much more impressive. And this album also contains my favourite political lyric of the year, in a song about Canada’s oil sands: “I lift my skirt for the economy.”

I’m ecstatic this made the short list, because albums like this—mostly with regional appeal, released on a tiny indie, appealing mostly to the artist’s immediate musical community—are easily lost in the sands of time. Now it’s part of the canon. As it should be.

The chances:

Mild. Okay, maybe better than that, if jurors give this album enough time to grow on them. But I’m purposely low-balling my expectations here.

Drake – If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (Universal)

The album:

Is this an album? Or a stopgap before the much-hyped Views from the 6ix, expected in a matter of weeks now? No matter, it’s already made history: due to the ever-changing rules of what constitutes a single, Drake now holds the Billboard record for most simultaneously charting hits: all of these 17 tracks were on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart as of Feb. 26. This album was also the first 2015 release to sell a million copies (it might be the only one).

I’ve spent more time listening to Drake than any other artist I continue to actively dislike, and I recognize that I will lose any argument about his artistic merit—so I’m not even going to try anymore. I will, however, grant that his voice is no longer as cloying and flat as I used to find it; dude actually sounds like he’s trying to impress us instead of expecting us to just melt at the sight of his smile. And for an album that is, by its billing as a mixtape, assumed to be tossed off quickly, tracks like “Energy,” “10 Bands” and “6 Man” are—well, not among his greatest work, but they’d hold their own beside anything on Take Care or Nothing Was the Same. Everything else here is a decent B-side.

The chances:

Good. Drake’s been shortlisted twice, and he’ll likely win eventually. Why not this year? Competition is not that fierce; there is no obvious favourite. It would be somewhat amusing if the man whose first big single boasted about how he “got rich off a mixtape” wins the Polaris for… a mixtape.

Two of the should’ve, could’ve beens:

Pierre Kwenders – Le dernier empereur Bantou (Bonsound)

The album:

This was my favourite discovery of last year, thanks to a tip from Montreal writer Erik Leijon. It was released in October, got a Juno nomination for Best World Album, and I didn’t hear it and write a review until March; he didn’t get around to playing Toronto, to my knowledge, until this summer (July on the Roy Thomson Hall patio, August at Camp Wavelength). My March review:

Montreal has Canada’s best African music scene and its best electro scene. Naturally, it’s also the city most likely to witness fusion between the two. Kwenders was born in Kinshasa and came to Canada from the Congo at 16; his fellow Montreal producers hail from Mozambique (Samito) and New Brunswick (Alexandre Bilodeau of Radio Radio, whose bizarro Acadian take on hip-hop landed them on the Polaris Prize shortlist a few years back). One track here, “Mardi Gras,” featuring a lilting, distorted violin track, is perhaps the only Cajun-Congolese electro track ever made (see below). That’s only the beginning of the successful cross-pollination happening here: dancehall, South African rhythms, cumbia, Bollywood vocals, rock guitars and hip-hop all help colour Kwenders’s tracks. If Manu Chao or Bran Van 3000 had kept pushing their sonic explorations further, they’d likely end up in a similar place to Kwenders. Whatever you do, the man who sings in four languages told the Montreal Gazette, don’t call it world music: this is polyglot pop, and it’s a matter of time before Santigold or Rihanna starts ringing him up.

Or, as it turns out, Arcade Fire’s Win Butler, according to rumours. Too bad they didn’t hook up before Reflektor; I could see Kwenders making that good record even better.

Why it didn’t make the short list: 

It’s hard enough to get a francophone on the short list, never mind a guy who sings in five languages. Also, Congolese rumba is yet to be recognized as a breakout genre. (But it’s only a matter of time. See: Mbongwana Star).

Jean Leloup – A Paradis City (Grosse Boite)

The album:

Because most of Canada prefers to ignore francophone music—from Quebec or anywhere else—we know next to nothing about Jean Leloup. Our loss. Who is this wolfman, and why is he such a Quebecois hero? From my May review:

Leloup has been around since 1989; he took a brief hiatus in the mid-2000s and this is his eighth album. He’s the kind of carefree, globe-trotting troubadour who tries his hand making documentaries about monkeys in Costa Rica for six months, just because. He’s not wrapped up in rock stardom, despite his iconic status in his home province.  That’s why A Paradis City is such a refreshing, welcoming record: Leloup exudes charisma, and writes anthemic songs that never succumb to bombast or weighty instrumentation—even when he calls in the choirs or string sections. Leloup makes it sound easy—hell, he even makes it look easy, by providing chord charts in the liner notes, and there are vocal-free karaoke versions up on his website. A Paradis City is the sound of a guy who could dial up the drama if he wanted to, but prefers more subtle strengths. There are quiet folk songs here, midtempo rockers, and a triumphant title track that shows, among other things, how much Sam Roberts learned from Leloup.

  

Since falling for this record, I’ve gone back and listened to more Leloup, including his iconic ’90s album Le dome. They’re all fascinating, but this is clearly one of his best. He’s getting better with age—when he decides to engage.

Why it didn’t make the short list: 

Polaris jurors have been piss-poor at nominating francophone records lately. Only four franco acts have ever shortlisted: Malajube twice, and Karkwa won in 2010. The last one to shortlist was Galaxie, in 2011. Also slept on this year: the amazing record by Salomé Leclerc, which I discovered too late in the game. If you claimed to care about new Canadian music at all in the last 12 months, you need to hear Kwenders, Leloup and Leclerc.

Pre-Polaris, day two: Braids, Caribou

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.

The first in this series is here.

Braids – Deep in the Iris (Arbutus)

The album:

First off, I simply cannot believe how much the piano chords that open this album remind me of the breakdown in Chalk Circle’s “April Fool” (which is almost 30 years old, by the way). Then there’s the fact that I keep hearing echoes of the Cocteau Twins. But that’s just this geezer talking. Everything else about Braids is firmly rooted in the 21^st century, as this trio becomes increasingly more electronic, anchored by the ace drummer Austin Tufts. I want to give the Polaris money to that guy alone, he’s that good.

What Braids do as a band I find admirable, but it’s incredibly heady. It seems torn between a band that deals primarily in abstracts and a band that wants to write direct pop songs. I’d rather they dive off the deep end and get as weird as they want to. When they get political, as they do on the much-praised feminist anthem “Miniskirt,” it comes off more like an earnest sociology student’s first attempt at songwriting, rather than the seasoned veterans Braids are at this point. It’s clunky, both melodically and lyrically. The rest of the album fares much better: “Taste Revised” proves their pop mettle, even if it sounds a lot like, um, Sarah McLachlan. “Getting Tired” is lovely. “Sore Eyes” is similar to Blue Hawaii, the side project for vocalist Raphaelle Standell-Preston.

Now, a Caribou remix of this entire record—that might be something. I know they already share a lot of the same synths.

The chances:

Strong. This is the kind of heavily layered album that might convince jurors with repeated listens. It’s also the brainiest record on this list. And jurors are nothing if not huge nerds.

Caribou – Our Love (Merge)

The album:

I’ve loved just about everything Dan Snaith has ever done, dating back to his 2001 debut, Start Breaking My Heart. And yet this is the first time he’s left me relatively cold. Why?

It might be that the opening track and lead singe, “Can’t Do Without You,” seems like the slightest of ideas in search of a song; once you’ve heard the three-second hook, very little else happens for the remaining four minutes. It might be that the album’s centrepiece, “Second Chance,” featuring Jessy Lanza on vocals, has this odd phase-shifting effect that actually makes me physically nauseous, and the synth tone, which appears on several other tracks, I find especially grating. Purely subjective, I realize. But several other tracks also fall flat, which is odd for a guy who doesn’t usually pad his albums with filler (he does, however, release plenty of B-sides, where he’s released as much music as can be found on his albums).

I’ll happily take four tracks here for posterity: “All I Ever Need,” “Our Love,” “Mars,” “Your Love Will Set You Free,” the latter of which makes this one of two albums on this year’s list that fulfills Polaris’s Owen Pallett quota.

The chances:

Slim. No previous winner has won again. Now that Polaris is 10 years old, that may well change in the near future. Not for this album, though.

Two of the should’ve, could’ve beens:

Bahamas – Is Afie (Brushfire)

The album:

What’s that, you say? Yet another singer-songwriter from the land of Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young and Leonard Cohen who writes beautiful songs and sings them in a cracked late night voice and pulls in some string sections and female backing vocalists and whose guitar skills are better appreciate live than on his subtle recordings? Surely we’ve heard this story before. And yet, so precious few do this as well as Afie Jurvanen, and this is his finest album to date.

My August 2014 review:

Another singer/songwriter album, another dozen love songs—except that this one sets the bar considerably higher, right from the opening lyrics: “I held your breath inside my lungs for days / and I saw myself as just one of many waves / when I knew I’d become the ocean’s slave / I just stayed.”  Afie Jurvanen recorded his first two (highly acclaimed) albums in the space of a week each. On this, his third, Jurvanen spent a whole summer in a studio. His love of late-night sessions fuelled by Willie Nelson and wine hasn’t changed; nor has his modest reluctance to showcase his skills as a soloist. But the extra attention to detail is obvious in every carefully constructed track, from the lovely vocal arrangements to the occasional string section to just the right amount of space left inside every song: Bahamas is all about the subtle charms, the soft sell.

Qualifier: there are two total stinkers on this otherwise flawless record. One is the single “All the Time,” the whining guitar riff of which wore out its welcome by the third time I’d heard it. The other is “Record Store Girl,” which is far too cutesy and out of character—or maybe this song just makes me feel self-conscious and uncomfortable because, just like some cliché devotee of High Fidelity, I’ve always had an inherent crush on just about any female employee of a record store I’ve ever met. Doesn’t mean I’d write a song about it, though.

Fun game: pronounce "Bahamas" by combining Ebenezer Scrooge and the Palestinian organization. 

Why it didn’t make the short list:

Excellent question. This was the first album of the Polaris qualifying period I heard that I felt was a shoo-in.

Amelia Curran – They Promised You Mercy (Six Shooter)

The album: I want to transform this album into a blanket and wrap it around me in my darkest moments. Such is the power of Curran’s voice and her songs. My November 2014 review:

The East Coast’s Amelia Curran has been stopping listeners dead in their tracks ever since her 2008 album War Brides brought her to national attention. Until now, her approach has been relatively bare bones; this, on the other hand, is a full-blown rock record by comparison, full of ringing electric guitars, powerful drums, strings (by Drew Jurecka, of Jill Barber’s band), horns (by Bryden Baird, of Feist’s band), lap steel, accordion, and some stunning jazz piano and organ work by Aaron Davis (Holly Cole Trio).  If you’re a folkie singer/songwriter looking to expand your sound, you’d be hard pressed to find a better producer than ex-Rheostatic Michael Phillip Wojewoda, a man who’s worked in almost every genre of music and knows how to capture dynamics. Your song that sounds perfect with just your own stunning voice and minimal guitar accompaniment sounds even better with what Wojewoda decides to add and how he does it.  Curran herself is a master of empathy, the kind of voice you need to hear in your darkest moments, the kind of voice that has lived through mood disorders and anxiety (the topic of a current public awareness campaign she’s spearheaded) and reaches out in song.

Here, with the help of many friends, a variety of tempos and textures ensure that it’s not a dour affair. It’s much more than that: it’s a powerful record by a major artist.

Listen to “I Am the Night,” “Song on the Radio,” “Somebody Somewhere” or “Coming For You” or “Never Say Goodbye”—hell, just listen to the whole damn thing.

Why it didn’t even make the long list: 

Total mystery. She’s made the Polaris long list before, back in 2010. She has a powerful indie (Six Shooter, home to last year’s winner, Tagaq) behind her. She has Wojewoda behind the boards. She made news with her mental health campaign. She has heaps of ECMAs and Juno nods and is up for four Canadian Folk Awards in November. And yet she was snubbed at Polaris for what is her finest record to date? Weird. As Joni would say: "Oh, Amelia, it was just a false alarm."

Pre-Polaris, day one: Alvvays, BadBadNotGood

The 10^th Polaris Music Prize gala is a week tonight, 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.

Alvvays – s/t (Royal Mountain)

The album: 

To some degree, every other album on this year’s Polaris short list could be construed as a surprise—but not this one. From the moment it was released in July 2014—a full year after it was finished, while the band looked for the right label and built reams of positive press—Alvvays had Canada’s critics in the palm of their hand. It’s easy to see why. Molly Rankin writes lovely pop melodies of lost innocence and what she terms “Adult Diversion,” and then buries them in the mix alongside fuzzy and jangly guitars that strike a chord with anyone who ever loved early R.E.M., Blake Babies, or anything on K Records. The album was produced by mad genius Chad Van Gaalen, who specializes in lo-fi sonics. Alvvays sound fantastic if you’re in your teens or 20s, caught between worlds, struggling to articulate heartbreak and longing, taking long walks along the rocks and writing your names on overpasses.

And yet—this record drives me nuts. I love Rankin’s lyrics and her melodies, but something about her vocal tone here is like nails on chalkboard for me. What’s frustrating is that I sense she’s a much better singer than we’re witnessing here; maybe she suffers from Plaskett-itis, writing melodies just slightly out of her range. Then there’s Van Gaalen’s production: I love the way his own records sound, like they could fall apart at any minute; I love his guitar tones, his electronic shadings, his fragile voice. Sadly, this Alvvays record doesn’t sound anything like a Van Gaalen record: it’s a trebly blur that suggests he merely set up microphones outside their rehearsal hall.

That said, it’s impossible to deny the melodic and lyrical punch of the opening lines of “Archie, Marry Me”: “You’ve expressed explicitly your contempt for matrimony / You’ve student loans to pay and will not risk the alimony.” And the opening guitar riff of “Party Police” makes me… feel things. But I feel like everything about this record doesn’t do this band any justice.

The chances: 

Strong. I feel like the only critic in Canada who didn’t adore this record; surely it will have more than a few fans in the jury room. Were it to win, it would be the first time a so-called “indie rock” record—by which I mean a record that actually sounds like what the term “indie rock” was understood to signify back in the 1990s (hello, Velocity Girl!)—will have won the Polaris. CBC Radio 3 and Indie88 listeners will rejoice.

BadBadNotGood feat. Ghostface Killah – Sour Soul (Lex)

The album: 

It’s only a matter of time before an instrumental hip-hop band hooks up with an MC and finally get the attention they deserve. The Toronto jazzbos had done various collaborations before, but mostly live—not on their own albums. Ghostface Killah, of course, is from the legendary Wu-Tang Clan: a once-revolutionary group, now a heritage act whose debut is almost 25 years old, with a collective discography that’s far too vast for most fans to keep up with. That said, Ghostface’s name undoubtedly still carries weight (witness the recent beef with Action Bronson). This album was recorded before BBNG’s far-superior (and fully instrumental) third album (titled, um, III), and goes some way to explain the giant leap they made after their second album: far more confident, far more dexterous, far more textural and subtle. In other words, why Sour Soul is getting significantly more attention than III did is due entirely to Ghostface, even though he’s largely incidental to this album: he played no role in the genesis of the tracks, recorded his vocals remotely, and doesn’t really gel—Danny Brown and Doom prove to be more interesting in their brief cameos than Ghostface does on most of the record. This would be as good or better an album without him. He does, however, leave us wondering what he means by: “With the strength of 10 midgets, Ima murder you, son!”

The chances: 

Good. The music here stands to appeal to any curious music fan: this is not just a hip-hop album, but one that draws heavily from jazz, soundtracks and psychedelic rock. Ghostface will make or break jurors’ impression of the record: is he an asset or a distraction?

Two of the should’ve, could’ve beens:

Afiara Quartet with Skratch Bastid – Spin Cycle (Centrediscs)

The album: If you only listen to one collaboration between a string quartet and a hip-hop DJ this year—this is the one. My review from May: 

This young Toronto string quartet commissioned four composers to write new pieces for them, which they recorded and then handed over to turntablist Skratch Bastid (Buck 65, Shad) to remix; the musicians then went back to the composers to add more material responding to the remix, furthering the musical conversation.  The idea seems like it’s better suited for an arts grant proposal than a record you’d actually want to listen to. But this works. The composers and the players here aren’t looking to write music for the 18^th century: this is modern work for modern players, whose occasionally percussive style suits the transformation to hip-hop perfectly.  String quartets have an inherently nimble nature that all small ensembles do, which makes their work easier to isolate and pull apart—especially if you’re doing so with their complete participation. Skratch Bastid will take an eight-bar riff and loop it, then take the violin line and make it sing in new ways via pitch shifting, while bringing in sampled drums and keyboards and anything else he likes.  Obviously the remixes are the real draw here, but the original works—by Dinuk Wijeratne, Laura Silberberg, Rob Teehan and Kevin Lau—stand entirely on their own merit, and not just as remix fodder. It’s there that Afiara shows off their subtle and dynamic side, where they prove that they’re not just brash players who secretly want to be in a rock band. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  For such an oil-and-water experiment, there is some serious emulsification happening here.

Why it didn’t even make the long list: Classical music. Also: May release date (Polaris cutoff is June 1).

Lydia Ainsworth – Right From the Real (Arbutus)

The album: 

My review from January:

Ainsworth is straight from the lineage of (obvious yet inevitable comparisons) Kate Bush, Bjork, Fever Ray and Grimes: a classically trained cellist who scores films and draws as much inspiration from visual art and dream states as she does music. Indeed, she says she wants her music to feel like “shivers caused from a lucid dream.” Mission accomplished. Ainsworth’s layered cello and electronics are entrancing; her voice is conventionally beautiful; her songs unconventionally arranged, tripping over time signatures and easily melding textures both natural and otherworldly with strong melodies tying everything together. Ainsworth has a good home on Montreal’s Arbutus Records—home of Grimes, Blue Hawaii, Braids and other wonderful weirdos. But comparisons and compatriots are not even necessary when she’s made a debut album as strong as this.

Why it didn’t make the short list: 

You’d think this would be prime Polaris bait, being somewhere between Austra, Jessy Lanza and Owen Pallett. Votes went to Braids, Jennifer Castle or Caribou instead. But bet on seeing her on plenty of future Polaris lists.