- Broken Social Scene – Broken Social Scene (Arts & Crafts)
You gotta root for your own, and if sprawling indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene has become somewhat of a local cause célébre, well, they deserve it. It couldn’t have been easy for them to shoulder the crushingly heavy expectations for their long-awaited (three years and counting) second record, but the hometown heroes rewarded the wait with a dense, difficult, and utterly beguiling work that reveals more of itself with every subsequent listen. Yeah, it’s a mess-a massive, layered, dramatic mess-but that’s the beauty of it. What other group would bury a K-OS cameo in swirls of sound and Leslie Feist’s hyperactive yelps (“Windsurfing Nation”)? Who else piles slivers of vocals and bits of blips on top of each other until the entire thing builds up to the point of collapse (the patented approach of BSS producer Dave Newfeld)? Half the time you haven’t the faintest idea what ringleader Kevin Drew is singing, and you realize you’re so deep into the music that you don’t even care, as when the vocals drop out of “Ibi Dreams of Pavement” before the entire thing bursts into a cacophony of horns. Art for art’s sake. A place for everyone and everything in its place. Glorious noise for an equally wonderful time in this city’s musical history.
- Jason Collett – Idols of Exile (Arts & Crafts)
Finally, a master craftsman gets his due. Flying under the radar for years as one of this country’s finest songwriters (yes, above and beyond the likes of Ron Sexsmith), Jason Collett toiled as a carpenter in the early years to make ends meet, and it’s an apt trade for a musician whose work bears all the hallmarks of assiduousness. While he’s always had a knack for sketching out a story in song with little more than a guitar and his rough-hewn croon, logging time in the Broken brigade has clearly injected some much-needed bravado into the troubadour, and he calls on a little help from all his talented friends for his finest effort to date. Any record that opens with a one-two punch of duets with Amy Millan (“Fire”) and Emily Haines (“Hangover Days”) has got to be something special, but the songs-from bruised ballads to twangy rockers-are pure Collett. On the record’s centrepiece, the elegiac “We All Lose One Another,” Collett and his brethren sing in harmony, “We all lose one another along the way.” Hardly. In allowing his musical family into his own orbit, Collett ensured that his star would shine that much brighter.
- M.I.A. – Arular (XL)
“I got the bombs to make you blow/I got the beats to make you bang,” Maya Arulpragasam declared on “Pull Up The People,” a track from her incendiary debut, Arular. No kidding. If 2004 was the year of the mash-up, 2005 belonged to artists who took that modus operandi to the next logical level. A Sri Lankan Brit art-school grad who learned to make beats on an old drum machine, she rolled out the riddims fast and furious, evoking her estranged Tamil freedom fighter father in one breath while text-messaging a hottie in another. If the iPod generation was yearning for music that lured them onto the dancefloor while also making them listen a little more closely through the headphones, they found their gal in M.I.A. She didn’t just cut-and-paste from across genres-she gleefully stomped all over the idea of musical boundaries and created something wholly her own. Or, as she put it: “Slang, tang/That’s the M.I.A. thang.” Indeed.
- Metric – Live It Out (Last Gang)
Sometimes the good guys win. After years of setbacks and a nomadic existance, Metric came back home, turned up the guitars, and delivered a dynamic salvo against the forces of pop mediocrity, and in the process deservedly vaulted to the top of the indie-rock pack. The radio stations they thumbed their noses at started spinning their tunes in heavy rotation, they painted the small screen with blood in their subversive video, and even scored a prime slot opening for none other than the Rolling Stones-at Madison Square Gardens in New York City, no less. While fiery frontwoman Emily Haines’ sweet-and-sour voice remains the focus, Live It Out is the sound of Metric truly coming together as a band. The killer pop hooks are tempered by Haines’ always clever, often wary lyrics: “I fought the war, but the war won!” she declares on “Monster Hospital.” Clearly she didn’t get the memo-the Metric system trumps all others by upholding one imple truism: smart is sexy.
- Final Fantasy – Has a Good Home (Blocks)
Boy writes (and plays, and sings) mini-symphonies about the CN Tower. And Sarnia. Not to mention a love song for Win and Régine of a certain red-hot buzz band from Montreal. How could we not fall in love with Owen Pallett? It’s tempting to avoid all mention of The (cough) Arcade Fire when discussing the violin wonder, but it was after he bowed and plucked his way into the indie-kids’ hearts while opening said band’s sold-out three-night stint at the Danforth Music Hall last April (not to mention joining the ensemble as part of their string section) that his little gem of a record finally begin to fly off the shelves. Armed with little more than his violin, choirboy voice, looping pedal, and imagination to burn, Pallett found his place in this year’s Canuck indie-rock pantheon in a rather unique way: by standing alone. Not that he didn’t have an arm entangled in the scene’s group hug-in fact, at a time when this city is flourishing culturally, he reminded us that the final fantasy may very well be that there’s no place like home.
- Sarah Harmer – I’m a Mountain (Universal)
One day fledgling musicians will worship at the altar of Sarah Harmer in the way they currently do fellow Canucks Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot. The woman writes the kind of deceptively simple yet utterly timeless songs that deserve to be classics someday, as evidenced by the acoustic framework of the bluegrass-and-folk-tinged I’m a Mountain, which strips her tunes down to the melodic bones and lets her finely nuanced voice shine through. There are those who still long for Harmer to return to her scrappy indie-rocker persona of Weeping Tile days past, but the turn towards sweeter strains suits this country-gal-at-heart. Besides, she’s more interested in a whole other kind of nostalgia. Whether she’s pining for a lost lover on the note-perfect Dolly Parton cover “Will He Be Waiting For Me?” or lamenting the degradation of her natural habitat on “Escarpment Blues,” Harmer sounds like she’s keeping an eye on the past while forging ahead into the future.
- controller.controller – X-Amounts (Paper Bag)
Post-punk. Death disco. Call it what you will, but controller.controller ain’t interested in your labels. They just wanna make you dance-and think. Maybe even both at the same time (imagine that). While the rest of the hipster set seems content to recycle the same formulas ad infinitum, the controller crew keep pushing their trademark dark sound further-the snaky basslines and ferocious beats are still heavy, the guitars still snarly, but X-Amounts reveals new shades of mood indigo with every listen. “You should swallow/Every word that I say/So you can spit them out/When you cry,” fiery frontwoman Nirmala Basnayake sneers on “Poison/Safe,” and hers is a voice that can’t-and won’t-be ignored. While her spoken-sung vocals and cryptic lyrics helped set the group apart from the rest of the dancefloor-focused pack on their debut History EP, she’s nothing short of a revelation here, having developed her voice and her lyrical imagery far beyond the promise of that initial release. And controller’s burgeoning popularity means that more T-dot indie kids will get to see their city’s diversity finally reflected in the pint-sized singer of their favourite band.
- Kanye West – Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella)
Lord knows Kanye West had a hard act to follow, given the size and scope of his innovative The College Dropout debut. But instead of falling into the dreaded sophomore slump, the hardest-working rapper in the biz was smart enough to seek assistance from an unlikely source-NYC producer Jon Brion, best known for his work with songstresses like Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. While the collaboration may have sounded dubious on paper (high-concept hip-hopper + orchestral song doctor = overblown mess?), it translated to disc splendidly, West’s hyper-articulate flow aided and abetted by Brion’s elaborate arrangements. Of course, no good hip-hop record is complete without its cast of characters, and West makes the most of his guests-anyone who can make Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine sound like a smooth soulster rather than a castrated canine has got to be doing something right. It’s the blazing “Touch the Sky,” featuring newcomer Lupe Fiasco totally holding his own with West as a horn section fires on all cylinders all around them that makes one marvel at what’s still yet to come from our man Kanye.
- Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings – Naturally (Daptone)
Slide this disc into the CD player and close your eyes, and you’d swear a vintage slab of hot wax had just been slapped on the 45. But there’s nothing self-consciously retro about soul mama Sharon Jones’ collaboration with Brooklyn funk combo the Dap Kings-in fact, they make a compelling case that deep grooves and brass blasts need to find their way back into contemporary music, stat. Because if soul is all about tradition, boy, what we’ve been missing. It’s not hard to believe that Jones was working as a prison guard before being discovered as a singer-you wouldn’t want to mess with this woman. If soul is all about feeling, then Jones will make you feel it, baby, and the Kings back her up in fine style. From their remarkable funk take on folk standard “This Land is Your Land” to the sultry “How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?”, every number sounds like an unearthed classic. “If you can’t feel the music on this album, then you must be a dead ass!” Jones has said. You sing it, sister.
- The Kills – No Wow (Domino/RCA)
Fuck whimsy. Sometimes all you want is some good old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. On that score, bi-coastal (Florida/London) duo The Kills (Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince) come up aces, all smeared eyeliner and heroin chic. They’re cunning enough to be coy about their romantic status, à la their most obvious touchstones The White Stripes, but while they share that band’s penchant for fuzzed-out blues, Meg and Jack only wish still they were making music as visceral as this. If they’re not a couple, The Kills are surely fooling us-the two play up the fuck/fight dynamic at full throttle (it comes as no surprise that two of the best tunes here are titled “I Hate The Way You Love,” and “Your Love Is A Deserter”), and blithely drag the listener along into their twisted fantasies. What’s more, they make you wanna watch. But it’s fitting that the song that sears itself into your brain is the disco-beat-driven “The Good Ones”-Hince’s guitar throbs alongside Mosshart’s nicotine-stained vocal come-ons in perfect sync. “Did you get me the good ones?” she demands, and you just know that he did.
