No. 35 - "It's an honour just to be nominated" edition
Handicapping the 2022 Polaris Music Prize
For the uninitiated, the Polaris Music Prize is an annual $50,000 cash award given to the year’s best Canadian album, “without regard to musical genre or commercial popularity.” The twist is that winners - along with the 10 album shortlist and 40 album longlist - are chosen by a jury of music critics, journalists, broadcasters, hosts and other music-industry folks. I’ve been lucky to have been on the jury for 10 years, in which time my preferred pick has won exactly once (that would be last year when I was stumping for Cadence Weapon and his still awesome album Parallel World). So I’m not exactly a musical Nostradamus.
Still, this year’s shortlist, from which the grand jury will choose a winner during the Polaris Gala on Monday, September 19, might be one of the least obvious in the Prize’s history, boasting a bunch of left-field artists who are, for the most part, not household names along with a couple of artists well into the second and third decades of their respective careers.
Below is my attempt to handicap this year’s shortlist. Some of these albums I’ve spent a lot of time with, others I’ve only listened to once or twice. All are worthy of the critical (and sometimes popular) praise they’ve already received. This is a deeply myopic - and public! - attempt to make sense of it all.
If you see me at Monday’s Gala at the Carlu in Toronto, be sure to say hi. I’ll be the awkward music nerd in the back.
Artist: Charlotte Day Wilson
Album: ALPHA
Location: Toronto
Previously shortlisted: N/A
Charlotte Day Wilson is probably the popular choice to win, at least in terms of sheer name recognition and cultural impact. After a string of lauded singles and EPs, ALPHA certainly delivers. But, to my ears, it never rises above being a really good, modern R&B record. I find the crisp production a bit cold and Wilson an elusive character in her own music. A lot of folks certainly disagree with me and I’m happy to keep listening to it and Wilson’s future output. But at this point, I’m just not personally feeling this one.
Artist: Destroyer
Album: Labrynthitis
Location: Vancouver
Previously shortlisted: 2011
An inscrutable album from one of Canada’s most inscrutable artists. Hard to believe that Destroyer has only been nominated one previously, but if a left-turn/career-defining/career-reviving album like Kaputt can’t put the band (which often, but not always, includes friend-of-the-newsletter Joseph Shabason) it’s hard to imagine Labrynthitis winning. Regardless, based on what little I know about Bejar, I’m sure he’s given the whole matter very little thought.
Artist: Hubert Lenoir
Album: PICTURA DE IPSE : Musique directe
Location: Quebec City
Previously shortlisted: 2018
Hubert Lenoir digs genre-bending high-concepts. The Quebec City singer’s first album, Darlène, was about a Quebecois woman’s love affair with a suicidal American tourist and was the companion piece to his partner’s novel of the same name. Inspired by the cinema direct movement pioneered by Quebec filmmakers in the 60s, Lenoir sought to create his own take on the concept, capturing conversations and ambient noise from his day-to-day life with his phone, then weaving them into PICTURA DE IPSE’s 20 tracks. Even with a broadened musical palette that stretches well beyond the glam rock of his debut, it’s hard to imagine the mostly English jury rallying behind this one: nothing stunts a high concept like a language barrier. Still, on its face the record is intriguing and the execution strong and far stranger things have happened (*cough* Karkwa *couch).
Artist: Kelly McMichael
Album: Waves
Location: St. John’s, NL
Previously shortlisted: N/A
Not going to lie: I had assumed that Peterborough, ON born, St. John’s, NL-based Kelly McMichael was just another in the long like of good, personalitiy-less singer-songwriters who make up the Canadian folk industrial complex (not my term, but I’m using it). I was very wrong! A fully formed pop-rock start-in-waiting, McMichael arrives fully-formed, personality perfectlt intact on her debut. McMichael used to record as RENDERS, a more synthy project, and before that as Kelly McMichael and the Gloss, so she’s been around the musical block. But who hasn’t! The slight shift in sound - not to mention a half-decade of songwriting experience - has sharpened her hookwriting and storytelling, perhaps illusrated best in the new civic anthem “Montreal.” Will she win? As origin stories go, “Canadian music lifer makes good” isn’t that exciting, but as they say it’s all about the music and Waves certainly goes.
Artist: Lisa LeBlanc
Album: Chiac Disco
Location: Rosaireville, NB
Previously shortlisted: N/A
A self-styled “trash folk” artist, Lisa Leblanc, has been sharing her witty tunes with the rest of the country for over a decade. She’s sung in English in the past, but Chiac Disco her fifth album, is a tongue-in-cheek marriage of disco’s glitz with chiac’s rural roots. Chiac is a French dialect that mixes French, English and Algonquian. It’s mostly spoken by Acadians in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Acadians have a deep and rich history, but given the space constraints of a Substack newsletter, let’s just say they’re a culturally distinct group many Canadians know little to nothing about (I would include myself in this group prior to living in Nova Scotia for two years). The vernacular isn’t new to Polaris: hip hop group Radio Radio rap in chiac, particularly on their 2010 shortlisted LP Belmundo Regal. But look, I’ve got to be honest: this is my least favourite of this year’s nominated albums. There’s something cheap and chintzy about the backing tracks that just rubs me the wrong way - maybe that’s the point! Factor in the fact that I don’t speak chiac or even french really and you’ve got a perfect storm of “I don’t get it, but I’m happy it exists for those who do.”
Artist: Ombiigizi
Album: Sewn Back Together
Location:
Previously shortlisted: N/A
Obiigizi (pronounced “om-BEE-ga-ZAY,” meaning “this is noisy”) are my personal pick for this year’s winner which, if history is a guide, will doom them to lose. Made up of solo artists Daniel Monkman (aka Zoon) and Adam Sturgeon (aka Status/Non-Status). I’ve written about the duo before (see KKMC No. 29) and their ability to take their respective sounds and seemlessly blend the textures of dream pop and shoegaze (Monkman) with more traditional indie rock hooks and song structures while exploring their Anishnaabe identity. There always tends to be a “rock pick” on the list, but that usually involves three to five white guys doing a pretty established style verty well. That’s not the case with Ombiigizi. And while I still think the cultural headwinds are blowing against indie rock, Monkman and Sturgeon can claim to be adjacent enough to that whole scene throw spanners into predicitve machine.
Artist: Ouri
Album: Frame of a Fauna
Location: Montreal
Previously shortlisted: N/A
This is my dark horse pick to win this year. Polaris has tended to favour artists whose work touches multiple genres as opposed to specializing in one - this might explain why it took until 2019 for a pure hip-hop album to win. Ouri was raised in France before moving to Montreal where she became a DJ in the city’s rave scene. Frame of a Fauna her latest is a lot of things - R&B, jazz, electronic, ambient - and yet none of them all at once. Dark but not brooding, spikey but not jagged. It’s slippery that way; familiar and yet always just out of reach. You can see that in the choice of tours and collaborators: Jacques Greene, Yves Tumor and Helena Deland, with whom she recorded 2021’s Hildegard LP all posses that elusive quality that makes Frame of Fauna so intriguing and could ultimately net Ouri this year’s prize.
Artist: Pierre Kwenders
Album: Jose Louis and the Paradox of Love
Location: Montreal
Previously shortlisted: 2018 (Kwenders also guested on Radio Radio’s 2010 shortlisted LP)
An aural example of Canada’s much balyhooed “cultural mosaic,” Pierre Kwenders was born in Kinshasha before immigrating to Montreal where he became a DJ and songwriter. He sings or raps in five different languages (Lingala, French, English, Tshiluba, and Kikongo) and Jose Louis and the Paradox of Love, his third album defies genre categorization. Let’s just say its got a serious groove. I really dug Kwenders 2018 record Makanda but I was a bit disappointed in this new one - its a bit more chill and downtempo that I was hoping. Tbh, I feel like there are a lot of touchstones here that are going over my head and if I had more time I would dig more. Regardless, he’s got a lot of champions on the jury and his cross-genre/cultural sound can draw in a lot of folks who don’t normally spend much time with this kind of music.
Artist: Shad
Album: TAO
Location: Toronto
Previously shortlisted: 2008, 2010, 2014, 2019
Okay, you might have heard of this one. Toronto MC Shad previously hosted Q and currently hosts the excellent Hip Hop Evolution TV series. But more notably for our purposes here, since 2007’s The Old Prince, Shad has been shortlisted every time he’s put out an album but never won. So maybe the fifth time’s a charm? TAO is yet another perfect vehicle for Shad’s wry humour and astute social observations, but I don’t think it bests 2010’s TSOL Shad’s peak IMO. Unlike Destroyer though that might not carry as much weight given the consistency the MC has displayed throughout his career.
Artist: Snotty Nose Rez Kids
Album: Life After
Location: Vancouver
Previously shortlisted: 2018, 2019
By design, elevator pitches lack nuance but “Indigenous trap” does a pretty good job of summing up Snotty Nose Rez Kids vibe. Their skill at using an existing sound to torjan horse indigenous culture into mosh-pits around the country. This is their third kick at the can and while I love Life After’s energy - it’s hands down the most fun album on this list - I don’t think it betters 2019’s similary shortlisted Trapline. At normal award shows that wouldn’t matter, but given Polaris’s track record of focusing on the nominated LP, rather than cumulative triumphs, it seems unlikely we’ll see the duo walk away with the cheque. But who knows? Stranger things have happened.
Kool Kids Self Promotion Club
I’ve been hitting the album reviews hard (for me) lately. Both of the below reviews dropped at Exclaim.ca this week.
First up, the new album from New Zealand’s The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field. “Working through the dissolution of a long-term relationship, Expert in a Dying Field both refines and expands on the sound of their previous LPs.”
Next is those prog-punk scallywags, the newly reunited The Mars Volta and their new self-titled album. But wait -they’re not doing the prog-punk thing anymore! “Maybe there were clues in one of the more than two-dozen records Rodriguez-Lopez has released in the last 10 years, but Santana meets Tame Impala probably wasn't on many folks' bingo cards for the band's new sonic template.”
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.