Polaris People August 3: Kathleen Edwards, Grimes, The Dears, Drake And More
Y’know what’s awesome? Free records. Especially cool secret limited edition ones like the Scion Surprise 7″ series that we just announced.
Even better than records, though, are the artists who make them.
Like the Polaris People — y’know, all the folks nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, past and present — who’ve been hustling and doing interesting things.
We tracked down what a bunch of said Polaris People got up to this week:
Do you folks like visual documentation of your favourite acts performing and talking and stuff? Hope so, because there are new audio-visual thingees from past Short Listers The Dears, Dan Mangan and Patrick Watson.
The 2012 Short List nominees continue to be major newsmakers.
Grimes has officially been declared the coolest girl in Canada (seriously, who doesn’t want to be her friend?), which might have something to do with the fact people like ASAP Rocky want to hang with her. Or maybe it’s because she curates contests soliciting drawings of dragons having sex with automobiles.
Japandroids were the album stream of the week over at CBC Music. The band’s “Celebration Rock” record is also juror Mike Devlin’s pick to win the Polaris.
The world (Village Voice and Interview) is discovering Cold Specks. Over at Quick Before It Melts they’re pretty charmed, too.
Kathleen Edwards, meanwhile, has been owning the podium at CBC. That is, when she’s not telling them about how much she loves Talk Talk. Oh, and we should get over her famous boyfriend at this point.
Drake has had an average, everyday Drake-y week. In between getting his high school diploma and destroying his enemies at paintball he’s also been resurrecting Aaliyah, owning the MTV video award nominations and receiving custom University of Kentucky basketball championship rings. So, y’know, just a regular week.
Feistodon has gone next level. There’s now an interactive video of that Feist-Mastodon “A Commotion” single.
Over at 2B Magazine they think that YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN making the Short List is totes > than YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN getting a good review on Pitchfork (respect).
And Fucked Up have announced some new tour dates.
Finally, it was Chuck D from Public Enemy’s birthday this week. As such, we leave you with a short message from Jason Collett of two-time Polaris Short Listers Broken Social Scene. Fight the power.
