Cheers for Canadian Bands at Year’s End

Thanks to Joshua Ostroff at Spinner for pulling together this summary of the year in music, showing how Canadian acts dominated the year in music and critics’ year-end lists across U.S. media outlets. A small sampling: Feist’s “Metals” was named Best Album of the Year by Jon Pareles in the New York Times; The Sheepdogs became the first unsigned band to ever appear on the cover of Rolling Stone; Austra’s “Feel it Break” was named best album of 2011 in New York Magazine; and Fucked Up‘s album “David Comes to Life” was named by Spin as their top pick of 2011 (seconded by critics like Nate Knaebel in The Agit Reader). Earlier in the year, Arcade Fire shocked many in the music industry when they won the Best Album Grammy for “The Suburbs.” Ostroff writes,

Clearly, this has been years in the making. The Canadian indie scene has been in ascendance ever since Feist’s old band Broken Social Scene put “sprawling collective” into the music-critic lexicon with 2002’s ‘You Forgot It in People’. . . . But Canada’s combined musical might this year is still a revelation.

Ostroff also examines what’s contributed to the emergence of all this amazing talent (hint–it has a lot to do with government support) and the larger question of whether there’s such a thing as a Canadian sound.

Maybe the next time a Canadian band cleans up on an international stage, folks won’t be quite as surprised.