Housekeeping: If you missed the first post, it’s here: Let’s Give Out the 2024 Polaris Prize Part One.

Hi! You’re back! Awesome. I don’t know if this whole thing is interesting to anyone but me, but my house, my rules.

To recap: I used proprietary (read: flimsy and arbitrary) methodology on the 40 albums nominated for the prize, and found 23 that hooked me a little bit. I have 14 hours and one Cindy Lee record of music to listen to. Now I have to get to the 10 albums for my own shortlist for the Polaris Prize. So now we’re onto:

Step Two: The CulL

I have to eliminate 13 of these albums, I guess by July 11 if we’re sticking to their schedule. Since I finished the first post, I’ve developed a bit of a first step here: I’m going to listen to each album and give it the chance to disqualify itself. If for whatever reason, the record stops sounding awesome to me, I’m moving on.

None of these albums are bad! I’m certainly not the arbiter of taste. Lots of stuff just isn’t for me. As I see it, anyone with the guts to pour themselves into their art and share it publicly makes the world a richer place. Public praise and private criticism, you know?

So if you’re expecting snark, look elsewhere, we don’t deal with that here. And now: judgment.

…hm. I’ve spent a few days leaning in on these albums, and It’s much, much harder to weed out records than I expected. What I’m learning is that I often rush to judgment about an artist or a musical style, when I shouldn’t. This stuff is good.

For example: that Charlotte Cardin album? The one with the Confetti song that I thought came out in like 2019? I was sure that album would be way outside of my pleasure beam, and I’d move on by about track 4. Yeah, no. That album is fantastic. I could write 600 words on that record without breaking a sweat. She’s cool as hell, listen to that record. I love it, dammit.

Let’s keep going. I need to find a way to weed out 13 of these puppies.

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Okay. A full week after I started this, and I’ve managed to pare it down to 16 albums. I’m beginning to think that the people tasked with doing this for real must hate their job as much as they love it. Like, supporting independent music is awesome, and we all love drawing attention to artists that we think are underappreciated. But I really have no idea how I’m going to compare the records that I have here.

The 16 remaining for me are, in no particular order:

That’s a much different list than I would have expected when I started. There are some records that I fully expected to make the shortlist that didn’t even get here! Wild.

So the next thing I’m going to do is listen to them all again. It’s like two albums a day for the next week. The tricky bit is figuring out how to compare apples and oranges. Or apples and, like, carburetors. These artists are so diverse and unique that it’s impossible to find even a single criteria to hold them all up against.

PLOT TWIST: A friend I trust insisted I have to re-add the Cindy Lee album. He assures me that I made a mistake by eliminating it. So now we’re at 17.

Things are about to get interesting. For me, anyway.

Next up: STEP TWO: THE CULL: PART B: THE SHORTLIST

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