Hottest Bands in Canada 2009

This year marks the 5th edition for i(heart)music’s “Hottest Bands in Canada” poll. Happily, I was asked to chime in again. It’s a pretty straightforward process…dozens of the country’s top music writers, journalists and bloggers are invited to submit a ranked top 10 list of the hottest Canadian acts (bands or solo artists) in 2009, with both “hottest” and “Canadian” up to the individual writers’ discretion.

If you’ve been following my Polaris posts, you’ll recognize some of the names on this list. But the good thing about the Hottest Bands poll is that you can take chances on a few up and coming acts. I highly recommend you check out the full list…as in the past few years, it is a solid list of Canadian indie-rock (with a touch of hip hop, francophonie and Leonard Cohen). I also want to stress that just because Reverie Sound Revue didn’t make the official poll, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check their new album out. It is gorgeous.

Kudos to i(heart)music for his diligent work on this poll and on his almost daily reviews of great Canadian music.

10. Metric
After Live it Out, I thought Metric was just going to keep making albums that reminded me of how great they could have been. Fantasies gets me back to what I loved about their earlier tunes and gives me hope that they’ve still got a lot more solid songs left in them. The band has attitude, grit, and an album full of catchy hooks.

9. Andrew Vincent
I know Dan Mangan just won the Verge award for best artist, and that he should probably get the nod for hottest singer songwriter in Canada right now (and Nice Nice Very Nice is solid). But Andrew Vincent’s Rotten Pear is a witty and wry collection of sonic stories and musical memories that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s understated and self-depricating. Sure, it doesn’t scream out “Hottest In Canada”, but that’s the point. How very Canadian.

8. Think About Life
Think About Life, Clues, and Parlovr are duelling it out for the title of Montreal indie act that’s on the cusp of breaking big. They all had great albums this year, but the one I keep going back to is Think About Life’s Family. You can’t have this album on and not smile/move your hips. If you can, then you are officially and old crusty bastard.

7. La Patère Rose
Coeur de Pirate was leading my list of top franco acts all year, and then, out of nowhere, La Patère Rose snuck up and unseated her. This album is a wild blend of genres and styles, but overall it’s wonderfully happy, dancey and fun.

6. Braids
As far as I know, this band is from Calgary but going to school here in Montreal. They mix indie and noise and experimental stuff in an impressively accessible way. One of their songs showed up in my inbox earlier this year, thanks to a friend, and my email program was literally happier for the next 4 months.

5. Belle Orchestre
As Seen Through Windows is a monumental instrumental journey. This band understands exactly how powerful dynamics are in making layered, thoughtful music.

4. Ohbijou
While we’re talking about beauty, I’d be remiss not to include Oh Bijou’s second full length album Beacons. Ohbijou has the market cornered on melancholy, orchestral epic, ballads. They do what they do well and they just keep getting better.

3. Reverie Sound Revue
The sheer fact that RSR released an album means that I had to include it on my list. The fact that it is full of wonderful sounds and songs is icing on the cake. I was bowled over by the band’s EP in 2003. The long long long awaited follow up reminds me exactly why. It’s delicate and catchy and gorgeously put together. Although they aren’t really a “band” (no tours, not even any “real” shows), they are still the hottest.

2. Timber Timbre
I’m so excited for winter because this album is going to be my soundtrack for the cold frozen months when the days are mostly dark and spooky. This unsettling, crooning self-titled album is easily one of my favourite discoveries of the year.

1. Bruce Peninsula.
I’ve made no secret of my unnatural love for this band this year. A Mountain is a Mouth is a religious experience. I’m a convert.

Hit Machines

Two articles worth reading together:

Rob Walker on Pandora in the New York Times and an older piece from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. Both are about tech companies working to “predict” artistic tastes based on the formal characteristics of the art in question. The first is about music, the second is about film; but both deal with the problem of trying to use objective measures to make sense of subjective judgements.

Pandora has come a long way since its inception and I genuinely enjoy it as a way of finding out about new music (though I’ve used it less since there was a crackdown on Canadian user a little while back). Still, the connections it makes between songs and artists is at least worth using as part of a wider strategy of finding out about new music. The film story line prediction service Gladwell talks about seems a little less scientific. I’m not sure why music strikes me as easier to codify than film, but I guess where ever there’s money to be made from making the subjective more objective, then companies like Pandora or Epagogix will be trying to figure out the formula.

As Walker points out though, and as anyone who’s read Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love knows, trying to get rid of the cultural and social baggage that comes with art is ultimately a futile process. Pandora’s model rests on the belief that people’s music tastes should be based on purely musical attributes. Forget what your friends like, what the latest mp3 blogs recommend, or what Pitchfork said. Pandora thinks this shouldn’t matter when making musical decisions. But we’re social creatures at heart and we express our sociality through art. Stripping music, or film, or books of all the cultural infrastructure that gets built up around them might lead us to interesting musical discoveries, but there’s no art to it. It’s pure science.

Scene Building

As part of all the post-pop Montreal reviews this week, the following link made it's way into my inbox. It's a story that rounds up the top 5 "emerging" acts in Montreal right now. I don't really have much to say about the content of the list. The artists are all talented and worth a listen, though just like the rest of the Pop Montreal schedule, it's a pretty fractional and partial list of the various kinds of music the city has to offer. The fact that the list is there at all is what I found more interesting. If you've ever read my thoughts on the branding of the Montreal scene, you'll know that Spin played an influential role in shaping the discourse around music in Montreal a few years ago, back when the Arcade Fire were taking off. 5 years later, it's a much more fractured media and musical landscape and it seems to me that while the idea of a scene is still very powerful, how it plays out in reality is becoming ever more diffuse.

Maybe I had scenes on the mind last night when I attended the premiere of a friend's new documentary film: Taqwacore: The Birth of Islam Punk. The movie "follows the progression of the Muslim Punk scene: from its imaginary inception in a novel written by a white-convert named Michael Muhammad Knight to a full-blown, real-life scene of Muslim punk bands and their fans." My friend spent spent three years documenting taqwacore (Taqwa = "god consciousness" + Core) bands and concerts across the U.S. and Pakistan, catching glimpses as he went of the many and complicated faces of contemporary Islam. Oh, he also was there when a line up of taqwacore acts shocked the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America in Chicago with a frenetic concert that ended with hundreds of conservative Muslims fleeing the building and the cops showing up to shut the event down (easily one of the film's best scenes).

Throughout the film, I kept thinking about what it meant for the idea of "scenes" in cultural and communication studies, since here was a scene that was imagined before it was real. It's almost as if the scene needed a blueprint before it could exist. Michael Knight, the author who penned the original Taqwacores manifesto/fiction, is an active participant throughout the film, and it's clear he's had a role in actively building and maintaining this scene/community. The film (and its director) are now also playing their part in solidifying the idea of taqwacore. In a certain sense, the film itself is both a product of and a contribution to the ongoing evolution of the taqwacore scene.

All this is to say the movie is as much about music and Islam as it is about the way ideas migrate from place to place and person to person. Taqwacore and the cultural footsteps it leaves behind mean something different for each of the people who follow it.