The Polaris Project – June 12-15, 2024

hey, it’s me again. doing the thing where i review all 40 Polaris Music Prize longlist nominees for the fourth year in a row. i may as well, right? my life is a bore and all of its attendant tasks feel like pointless drudgery, but it’s good to have a project on the go, i guess. (if for no other reason than to keep the Dark Thoughts™ at bay!)¹

but before i begin, i’d like to announce a new rating system. instead of assigning each of these albums some incoherently specific number on a scale of 0-to-5 (as i did in the first three years), what i’ll do now is sort them into one of four categories: “top notch,” “good,” “fine,” and “better luck next time.” i’ll leave it to you to figure out what those mean and how they relate to one another.

here’s the first ten.

Girl with No Face by Allie X

i wish i had no face. so that i didn’t have to hear these lame-ass songs! wocka wocka!!

just kidding. as ’80s-influenced² synth pop songs go, they’re not that bad. they’re not that good either, but i’m trying to emphasize the positive, y’know? they have a respectably propulsive beat that i can bop my head to, and sometimes that’s enough. and, in this case, it has to be because this is music for mildly irreverent people who’ve convinced themselves that “not enjoying small talk” makes them the most subversive and put-upon beings who’ve ever lived. (this is, admittedly, a category of person i’ve only ever encountered on the internet, which is a sure sign that i ought to log off and “touch grass” occasionally.)

highlight: “Staying Power.” lyrically, it very much fits the archetype i described above, but you know what, i kinda liked it!

rating: “fine.”

The Returner by Allison Russell

alright. two albums in and i’m already starting to regret committing myself to this. i’m capable of churning out a healthy word count for excellent albums, but what do you do if an album is just OK? if it’s pleasant enough in the moment but leaves no lasting impression? that’s this one and, i have to assume, numerous others to follow. it’s a matter of trying to find novel ways of saying “yeah, look, it’s not really for me, but i don’t begrudge anyone involved!”

sorry to the gospel folk girlies out there, but i’m not one. i will at least concede that the drums, piano, strings, and harmonies on this record can be safely classified as “technically proficient.”

highlight: “Eve Was Black.”

rating: “fine.”

LES MANIÈRES DE TABLE by Annie-Claude Deschênes

ok, that’s more like it! a timely reminder of why i do this: in part to assess the artistic merit of the offerings presented to us by the voters of canada’s foremost “indie” music award (although i no longer have a clear sense of why this mandate should resonate with me in 2024),³ but mostly because it gives me a convenient source of 40 albums to comb through until i find something new that i like. this happened last year with Jairus Sharif and Yoo Doo Right, and it’s happened just now with Annie-Claude Deschênes. this album’s dance/post-punk vibes are infectious. loooove the dark synth and basslines and the gated reverb on Deschênes’ wry vocals.

highlights: “CULINARY SECURITY,” “MENACE MINIMALE,” “ELECTRIC LIGHT.”

rating: “top notch.”

Il n’y a rien que je ne suis pas by Arielle Soucy

i listened to this while making lunch. the least essential of the three standard meals calls for similarly pleasant, airy, not-too-heavy musical accompaniment, and this album delivered. i will admit that i wasn’t paying the closest of attention, but i’ll commend Soucy for her beautiful harmonies.

highlight: “Pardonne-moi.”

rating: “fine.”

INFINITY CLUB by BAMBII

(upon hearing the opening track) oh boy!!! i can’t wait to enter the Infinity Club!

(upon exiting the Infinity Club) hey, wait a minute! that was only 19 minutes of music just now. i want a (partial) refund!

highlight: “Slip Slide,” primarily for the lyric “pussy got me seeing a psychiatrist.” fucking incredible.

rating: “fine.”

The Ones Ahead by Beverly Glenn-Copeland

another good reason to undertake a project like this is that it occasionally forces me to listen to musicians i’d heard of and “meant to listen to” for years but, for whatever reason, just kept falling off my radar. such is the case with Beverly Glenn-Copeland, whose 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies is widely considered a standard of the “new age” genre. i was surprised to find that this was the first album released under his own name since then. here, Glenn-Copeland’s soft, raspy voice (which reminds me, curiously enough, of Scott Walker’s) soothes, overtop of tranquil keys and guitar. honestly, i’ve been having a string of bad days lately and this record brightened my spirits a bit. lovely!

highlights: “Africa Calling,” “People of the Loon,” “No Other.”

rating: “good.”

A Chaos of Flowers by BIG | BRAVE

out of laziness (and because it’s still true), i am going to say the same thing about this year’s BIG | BRAVE record as i did about last year’s.

“this one sounds basically identical to all their other albums, which is fine by me because i’m a certified Noise Rock Enjoyer. didn’t hit quite as hard as Vital or Au De La (though, as before, the question of why i prefer certain drone songs to others remains hard to pin down), but i will definitely keep listening to Big Brave for as long as they keep putting out new stuff. i’d love to see these folks play live some time!”

i will add that i was delighted to see Patrick Shiroishi’s name in the album credits this time around. big respect to my fellow Free Jazz Saxophone Squawk Appreciators.

highlights: “Not Speaking of the Ways,” “Chanson Pour Mon Ombre,” “Moonset.”

rating: “good.”

99 Nights by Charlotte Cardin

congrats to the guy who made that “we have banahnihs and avahcawdis” vine, like, eight or nine years ago, whenever it was. that exact vocal affect has had considerable staying power in popular music of the last decade. 99 Nights falls into a genre i’m fond of calling “car commercial music” – insubstantial, lyrically unimaginative, sterile production. i think the polaris committee should implement a rule that anyone who has won multiple junos for album of the year is henceforth ineligible for the award. this is entirely so that i don’t have to listen to Charlotte Cardin’s next album in another two years.

highlight “least worst”: “Looping.” taken as a whole, the song isn’t very good, but at least the chorus contains a mildly interesting sonic conceit!

rating: “better luck next time.”

Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee

i’ll open with a fun anecdote: last summer, i went to the Cindy Lee and Freak Heat Waves concert on the rooftop of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. i was wearing a white-and-blue floral dress – one which, i suppose, rendered me extremely clockable, given my “masculine” proportions and visible leg hair. this would account for why numerous people dressed in starched-collar, Sunday’s-best-style clothing shot me withering glances or openly mocked me. (i recall seeing a guy gesture in my direction out of the corner of my eye, while “whispering” to his buddy, “. . . trans, ya think?!” as they walked past.)

that wasn’t the fun part, but this is: as soon as the opener Kandekt had finished their set and Patrick Flegel (of Women fame)⁴ began setting up equipment while in drag as alter-ego Cindy Lee, i saw a bunch of those same people blanch with disgust and head for the exit. i even noticed one guy making a cutthroat gesture, wordlessly indicating “let’s get the fuck outta here!” to whoever he’d come with. at which point the vibes immediately ameliorated themselves and i had a pleasant rest of my evening.

the moral of the story, i guess, is that if you’re some rich hateful art gallery patron, perhaps you should consider doing a cursory google search of the musician you are paying to see perform before paying to see them perform. fucking morons.

anyway. Diamond Jubilee! this was already in the running for “album of the year” for me, long before i looked at the polaris nominations. i think i even did a fist-pump when i saw this on the list, due to being a dork who still cares about music industry awards for some reason. to whatever extent anyone ought to care about this shit, it’s a well-deserved honour.

i’ve seen the album described as “hypnagogic pop,” which might be a useful descriptor if only i knew what “hypnagogic” meant.⁵ for simplicity’s sake, i’d call it “noise pop” myself, but even that doesn’t fully capture what this is. the production distorts the instruments to sound crunchy and pitched-up slightly, as if being blasted from a defective stereo. which rules, of course. i am a sucker for the exact staticky, abrasive guitar tone that the album revels in. the vocals, meanwhile, are delivered in a poppier – and occasionally even country/western or doo-wop – cadence. the end result is that there are a lot of words you could conceivably use to describe Diamond Jubilee‘s genre and you’d be correct each time. it’s “whatever you want to call it,” and that’s a big part of why the album’s such a delight for eccentric gadabouts like me!

the lone drawback is the album’s behemoth runtime. at a little over two hours, it does take patience to listen to in full and can sometimes feel like a test of endurance (especially because many of the songs are intentionally schmaltzy riffs on ’50s/’60s love ballads). that said, the quality of the tracklist is so consistently high that there aren’t any obvious “cuts.” it’s just that when an album has 32 songs on it and only three of them are shorter than 2:45, it’s gonna add up. point is, if i’ve sold you on the album, be prepared to budget a decent chunk of your day for it. at this point, i’ve done so about seven or eight times. it’s so good.

highlights: “Diamond Jubilee,” “Glitz,” “Baby Blue,” “Olive Drab,” “Flesh and Blood,” “Stone Faces,” “GAYBLEVISION,” “Lockstepp” [sic].

rating: “top notch.”

Mimi by Corridor

if this and the Annie-Claude Deschênes album are anything to go by, there’s some real cool stuff going on in the Quebecois art rock scene. Corridor deftly combines elements of electronica, post-punk, surf, and math rock in a slickly produced album, by turns reminiscent of Real Estate, DIIV, and Preoccupations. this stuff is catnip⁶ to me.

highlights: “Phase IV,” “Mon Argent,” “Jump Cut,” “Caméra.”

rating: “top notch.”

Footnotes

1. i wrote this introduction while recovering from a knee injury and a few days prior to being hired as an arts and culture editor for a local newspaper. so, actually, everything is fixed now! mental illness permanently cured, baby! ↩︎
2. given the prevalence of pastiche/homage in contemporary popular music, perhaps the use of decades-as-aural-signifier is becoming less evocative over time, but i will proceed under the assumption that “you know what i mean.” ↩︎
3. after all, i have no emotional investment in curating a “cultural legacy” for the despicable settler-colonial project known as “canada,” so why should i care? or at least: this is what i am training myself to think until it becomes true by force of will. ↩︎
4. the name’s so funny because it compels you to clarify every time you bring them up that you are referring to the band known as Women (“y’know, Women? the defunct Calgary noise rock outfit?”). ↩︎
5. my good friend google tells me that “hypnagogic” refers “to the state immediately before falling asleep,” in which case: yeah! i can see that! ↩︎
6. “ratnip”? ↩︎