This was a great year for Canadian music, and this list only represents the tip of a pretty substantial iceberg. From extraordinary singer-songwriters to blistering punk, experimental electronica to shimmery pop, soulful hip-hop to grinding garage rock, this list demonstrates something of the breadth of talent, and the range of possibilities being explored in Canadian music today. Though it hardly represents all the great stuff that came out of Canada in the past 12 months, if you’re looking for a way in to the Canadian scene, this list isn’t a bad place to start. Stuart Henderson
Album: A Tribe Called Red
Label: self-released
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List Number: 10
A Tribe Called Red
A Tribe Called Red
A tremendously successful blend of hip-hop beats, pan-aboriginal rhythms and vocalizations, anti-racist politics, and deep-seated funk, this self-released (and still free to download, as of this writing) record by Ottawa-based First Nation visionaries is an absolutely revelatory listening experience. Electric Pow Wow, people. This is what the future sounds like.
Album: Jiaolong
Label: Merge
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List Number: 9
Daphni
Jiaolong
Dan Snaith (a.k.a. Caribou, Manitoba) continues to solidify his reputation as Canada’s foremost electronica artist. Especially in the guise of Caribou, Snaith’s genius for texture, for an almost synesthetic tangle of tone, colour, and groove, shone through at every turn. But with Daphni, Snaith explores retro dance grooves with a looseness and jagged-edged vulnerability that squares the circle of familiar/fresh. Building playful tracks that feel spontaneous, even improvised, it is his most scattershot record in a long while, but perhaps this is what makes it so affecting, so endlessly playable, and so goddamn fun.
Album: The Fate of the World Depends on This Kiss
Label: Six Shooter
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List Number: 8
Whitehorse
The Fate of the World Depends on This Kiss
Hamilton-based singer-songwriters (and married couple) Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland have been reborn as a rootsy Americana duo, and the results have eclipsed any of their previous work. The way their voices blend and harmonize, and the splendid alchemy that is this union of stylistic approaches, the one slipping delicately alongside the other, is something to behold. But it is the songwriting that will win you over, bring you back again and again to this marvelously honest album full of timeless tunes.
Album: The Other Side of Tomorrow
Label: Do Right
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List Number: 7
Slakadeliqs
The Other Side of Tomorrow
As I wrote on this site back in February: “Among Toronto’s most exciting musical voices, this DJ, producer, singer, songwriter, arranger, you-name — it has made one of this year’s best records. It sounds great, but it feels even better.” A kaleidoscope of reggae, folk, funk, pop, and 1970s-era Stevie Wonder-esque psychedelic soul, this is a hugely ambitious but still utterly accessible album. Soulful, richly melodic, and irresistibly joyful, this was the record that defined my back-porch summer afternoons.
Album: 12 Bit Blues
Label: Ninja Tune
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List Number: 6
Kid Koala
12 Bit Blues
An album of blues music built out of samples, this is the rare case where a high-concept record overcomes the novelty of its idea. Pulling from Chicago, the Delta, electric and acoustic, guitar and piano, country and boogie-woogie, this record is both deeply reverent and radically inventive. Listen as this most elemental of genres is reimagined by this most versatile of DJs; in his hands the tracks take on a hypnotic effect, their looping, yelping, sorrowful repetitions uncovering a new depth of emotion in music that was always, at its root, about catharsis and release. This is the blues as they’ve always been, and as they’ve never been before.
5 – 1
Album: METZ
Label: Sub Pop
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List Number: 5
METZ
METZ
This is 30 minutes of blazing, punishingly tough punk rock played with an authority and an unmistakable musicality undeniable as well as infectious. Toronto-based METZ has emerged fully formed with this outstanding debut record. Melody hides beneath layers of noise, sneaking around in the depths — you listen to the blitz of guitar/bass/drums, the ear-splitting loudness of the performances, and walk away humming a tune you didn’t even know you had heard. One of Toronto’s best live bands, too.
Album: Animator
Label: Dead Oceans
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List Number: 4
The Luyas
Animator
A spectral mood washes over this deeply beautiful record from Montreal’s Luyas. Drenched in echo and reverb, this haunted house of an album is alive with sweet, high-register vocals and layers of keyboards and guitar. Written and recorded in the wake of the sudden death of a close friend of the band, the songs explore the ache of loss, the arc of grief, and the challenge of continuance. The result is a nourishing, mesmerizing catharsis.
Album: ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
Label: Constellation
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List Number: 3
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
As I wrote on this site back in early October: Does this new record — comprised of four tracks, two of which clock in at about 20 minutes — improve on the post-rock formula that animated the now-classic Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)? Maybe. Like some harrowing fun house ride through a gloomy, slippery tunnel, toward a darkness that looms ever larger, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! is a strange and unsettling journey. But it is a mesmerizing, thrilling, unforgettable journey nonetheless.
Album: Americana
Label: Reprise
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List Number: 2
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Americana
An idiosyncratic, erratic, and frequently frustrating artist, Neil Young has made more than his fair share of lousy records over the past 15 years. He has ambled around in the twilight of his career, trying on different hats, and few have fit him as well as many of his listeners had hoped they would. But here, playing a collection of “standards” that he claims to have been formative in his musical development, backed by the sloppiest, greatest garage rock outfit you can name, Neil Young is utterly at home, journeying through the past. It’s a mess. But it’s a joyful, swirling, rocking mess.
Album: Voyageur
Label: Zoë/Rounder
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List Number: 1
Kathleen Edwards
Voyageur
A heartbreaking, heartbroken album full of glorious melodies, lush production, and terrific songwriting, this stunner of a “break-up” record snuck into my head back in February, sat down in my favourite chair, and put its feet up. It’s not going anywhere. “I don’t wanna feel this way,” Edwards sings on standout track “Pink Champagne”. But if she never had, we’d never have gotten to hear this record.
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