Cold Specks' I Predict a Graceful Expulsion was our Polaris featured album this week. Juror Howard Druckman feels strongly that the album should take this year's grand prize. The music writer explores the artistic strengths of Al Spx's debut album and what separates it from other albums on this year's short list. Druckman is the editor of the SOCAN magazine, Words + Music.
Cold Specks' I Predict A Graceful Expulsion deserves to win the Polaris Prize above all of the others on the short list because it's the most strikingly original recording of the bunch, the most genuinely mysterious, the most darkly beautiful and the one with the greatest emotional resonance.
It's an extremely strong short list of contenders, all of which I highly value, and about half of which (Cadence Weapon, Kathleen Edwards, Feist, Drake, Japandroids) might have been my number one if not for Cold Specks' remarkable achievement. These favourites have all made great albums, but they're all (arguably) working within established traditions, and of the five, only Cadence Weapon is (arguably) stretching the conventions of his genre.
Cold Specks, on the other hand, has virtually invented her own genre. Although she echoes various conventions of blues, folk, gospel, chain-gang, Appalachian and "alternative" music, Cold Specks sounds like none of these, exactly, and like nothing else I've ever heard, in the best possible way.
She takes a few very simple elements – blues and biblical lyrical tropes, her incredibly powerful field-holler of a voice, a few plucked acoustic guitar strings, or a few notes picked out on the piano – then builds unclassifiable arrangements of drums, a few horns, strings, or electric guitars around them to create something unique and sonically true to her haunted, haunting vision.
Nobody else on the short list uses such simple language, to craft such distinctive, mythical metaphors, conveying such deep emotional truth. If Robert Johnson were recording today instead of in the 1930s, this might very well be the music he'd be making.
Cold Specks has been dismissed by some in the Canadian critical community as an overhyped phenomenon from the U.K., where she first broke out. I say ignore the hype, the geography and any other surrounding circumstances, because her music is as good as it gets.
No other recording on the short list challenged me more, moved me more, inspired me more or provoked more thought and feeling than the Cold Specks album. Nobody on the short list, regardless of genre, matched her quiet intensity. Her music is, for me, beyond not only what the Polaris shortlist candidates have done, but what anybody else has done musically in the past year, not just in Canada, but anywhere. She's truly in a league of her own, and I can't wait to see what she does next.
What do you think of Cold Specks' chances of winning Polaris this year? Who's your pick to win the prize? Let us know in the comments.
Related:
Stream Cold Specks' I Predict a Graceful Expulsion
Follow our full coverage of the Polaris prize at CBCMusic.ca/Polaris2012