Polaris winners Karkwa back to square one

Francophone alt-rockers conquering the world one new audience at a time

KARKWA

With Aidan Knight, The Belle Game

When: Tuesday, 9:30 p.m.
Where: Biltmore Cabaret, 2755 Prince Edward
Tickets $15 in advance at Red Cat, Scratch, Highlife and TicketWeb.ca

When Montreal-based francophone rockers Karkwa won the Polaris Music Prize a year ago, it stunned more than a few observers. The band edged out some fierce competition, including Broken Social Scene, Shad and former Polaris winners Owen Pallett and Caribou, landing a prize — given to the Canadian album of the year based on artistic merit — that few would have predicted would ever go to a French-speaking artist. For others, it wasn’t all that surprising. (...)

Extracts :

La piqûre (“the sting”) juxtaposes a cocaine addict’s feeling superhuman with the image of a steroid-addled Olympic athlete, while Dors dans mon sang (“sleep in my blood”) is a smouldering junkie ballad, Cormier singing about blood being filled with “blazing sugar” asking it to “go away but remain, still.”

Cormier said both songs were inspired by close friends whom he had seen spiral out of control.

“Dors dans mon sang is about the struggle between addiction and the desire to break free,” he said. “La piqûre is about a coke addict friend who feels invincible when high. The idea and images in the song were inspired by a music video we saw where this guy gets hit by cars but keeps getting back up [UNKLE and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s Rabbit In Your Headlights].”

The album closes with the tender acoustic track Le vrai bonheur (“true happiness”) where Cormier sings about his girlfriend and about “sometimes forgetting what true happiness is.”

Les chemins de verre is a deeply poetic and musically spellbinding album equal parts classic Quebec singer-songwriter and atmospheric alt-rock, and its Polaris nod has given the decade-old band fresh horizons to look forward to, thanks to deals with new booking agents handling the wider North American and European markets beyond Quebec and France, where the band enjoys a steady stream of touring success and record sales. (...)

Read more: here 

By Francois Marchand, Vancouver Sun September 16, 2011
fmarchand@vancouversun.com

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