Canada Day Playlist: Artists Pick Their Favourite Canadian Albums of All Time

BY Josiah HughesPublished Jun 30, 2015

This week, we'll all celebrate the 148th birthday of Canada with Canada Day fireworks, barbecues and other traditional activities. No Canada Day is complete without a playlist, however, so we've asked some of our favourite artists to tell us their favourite Canadian albums of all time.

We reached out to a wide variety of people, from Fucked Up's Damian Abraham and Chixdiggit's KJ Jansen through Sarah Harmer, Tanya Tagaq, Teen Daze, Mac DeMarco, Nardwuar the Human Serviette, Jay Arner and many, many more. The result is a seriously diverse batch of releases that cover both classic choices, as well as a lot of surprises. There are not one but two songs about soda on the list, as well as some sharp critiques of Canada's history.

Read through these artist's submissions below and have a happy Canada Day.

Damian Abraham (Fucked Up)
Album choice: Fallen Angel of Doom… by Blasphemy



All it takes is a one line to sum up why this is the greatest Canadian record of all time: Fallen Angel of Doom… is the debut album by Vancouver's Blasphemy, a racially diverse Satanic skinhead black metal band, which was released prior to the birth of the Norwegian black metal scene and makes much of the bands associated with it sound like Dragonforce in comparison to its level of brutality.
 
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Sarah Harmer
Album choice: New Believers by Minotaurs



Dance. Revolt. Celebrate. Resist. This album is important for Canada right now. Music, street protest and conscious art has never had more work to do. This album gives you lots of energy to joyously fight for the country you love. Let the horns, the bass grooves, and the words fire you up. Right now our rights and freedoms are under threat from a surveillance state.  Right now our laws protecting fish and healthy waterways are practically gone. Right now the act of standing up against corporate interests and fighting for critical infrastructure like clean air and water is considered a threat to the economic stability of the country. This Canada Day let the musical fuel of Minotaurs shake your booty into the streets.
 
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Project Pablo
Album choice: Songs of Leonard Cohen by Leonard Cohen



Songs of Leonard Cohen is always an enjoyable listen: simple, yet profound. Nothing is over-done or over-produced about it — a perfect album in my opinion!
 
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Tanya Tagaq
Album choice: Bad Habits by the Monks



It may not be my fav Canadian album of all time but right now I am really into the Monks' Bad Habits because my three-year-old sings "bad rabbits" in the funniest misheard song lyrics ever. 
 
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Mac DeMarco
Album choice: Akimbo Alogo by Kim Mitchell



Akimbo Alogo because it has the song "Go for a Soda" and that song whips ass. Also the video whips ass. Kim whips ass.


 
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Teen Daze:
Album choice: Public Strain by Women



There's been more than enough written about this record, by people better at writing about music, so I'll keep it short. This is a record that keeps giving. It's always seemed to exist outside of time, sounding both incredibly inventive and timeless at the same time. I've spent lots of time listening to this record and it always manages to challenge me, but also get stuck in my head. Of course it's difficult to choose a favourite Canadian record, but in recent years Public Strain has been the one I keep coming back to.
 
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Jay Arner
Album choice: Your Blues by Destroyer



Hometown hero Dan "Canada's David Bowie" Bejar lays down some acoustic guitar, some pretty bad-sounding post-analog synthesizers, and little else. It's my favourite bunch of his always excellent songs, and as a lifelong keyboard freak, I pounced on it immediately. It's beautiful.
 
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KJ Jansen (Chixdiggit)
Album choice: Make It or Break It by BUM



My favourite Canadian album of all time is Make It or Break It by Victoria's BUM. Bum feature(d)(s) Andrew Molloy and Rob Nesbitt who are two of my favourite songwriters of all time — worldwide. This record was mostly written by Andrew as the original lineup had unravelled and the band was going on without Andrew's best friend Rob. The lyrics are the most sincere account of the loss of a close friend I can think of. Killer melodies too.
 
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Nardwuar the Human Serviette
Album choice: Perfect Youth by the Pointed Sticks



The Pointed Sticks formed in Vancouver in 1978, broke up in 1980, reformed in 2007,  broke up again in 2012 and now are back together in 2015 with a brand new LP out July 10th called Pointed Sticks!  Along the way they've produced the catchiest toons to ever come out of the Northwest. Catch them here in 'Out of the Blue' (1980) with Dennis Hopper. doola doot doo… the best!


  Andrew Lee (Holy Hum, In Medias Res):
Album choice: Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada by Godspeed You! Black Emperor



This album came to me at a very formative time in my life. I was a punk ass kid in high school and up until that point I was mostly listening to Nirvana, Silverchair and Michael Jackson. I can't really remember what was popular at the time and I can't really remember how this album got into my hands but I can still remember the feeling when I put the CD on and being all at once horrified and excited by what I was hearing. Using strings and extreme disparities in dynamics the two track album has a lot of subtleties but is also very maximalist in how all the pieces come together. I was never really the same person after coming across this record. Ever since 1999 my music has been an attempt to create the same type of narrative arc or unholy crescendo that I experienced and felt while listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Slow Riot for Zero Kanada.  
 
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Sarah Davachi
Album choice: Si on avait besoin d'une cinquième saison by Harmonium



After much deliberation, I'm settling on Harmonium's Si on avait besoin d'une cinquième saison, partly because that band never gets the recognition it truly deserves, and partly because all of the other albums I considered are decidedly rather depressing. I think Canadians have a knack for writing music that reflects our perpetual disjoint, and this beautiful album is really wonderfully all over the place. Maybe it's the flutes and Mellotron or the heavy Mike Oldfield Peace Demo vibe or simply the potent reminder that most parts of Canada do get four distinct seasons; I can't pinpoint it exactly but there's something pretty special about this album as far as I can discern. I also feel obliged to mention Canada's greatest and most heartbreaking song of all time: Ian & Sylvia's "Four Strong Winds."
 
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Ryan Dyck (B-Lines, Hockey Dad Records)
Album choice: Too Late, No Friends by Gob



There are lots of great Canadian albums, but none of them are my favourite Canadian albums. I like Leonard Cohen and Neil Young but they don't feel Canadian. I see Dan Bejar from Destroyer lurking around East Vancouver often, but even he feels like he shouldn't live here. My favourite Canadian album is Too Late, No Friends by Gob. Even at the height of pop punk's dominance in the late '90s/early 2000s, nobody outside of Canada liked Gob. I'm not even sure if people outside of BC liked Gob. These guys wrote stupid pop punk for stupid teens like me in stupid suburbs like mine. Yeah it's not that far off from other SoCal pop punk but they were our stupid pop punk band and you could spot places you recognized in their music videos. The backyards in the video for "Soda" looked like every backyard I remember as a youth. That video is a trashy work of art that is as close to John Waters as you're going find in a conservative hell hole like Abbotsford. There are other Canadian albums that are better, but I will never like them as much as I liked this CD as a 15 year old skateboarding through the endless parking lots of suburbia. There is a track that is all fart noises and kazoos. There are skits. It feels like you are just hanging out. I still never feel like hanging out with Leonard Cohen or Neil Young.
 
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Chris Dadge (Lab Coast, Bug Incision, Samantha Savage Smith band)
Album choice: Feeler of Pure Joy by Ryan Driver



Having a bit of a hard time singling out just one album for this list, so instead I will choose a recent gem. Ryan Driver's Feeler of Pure Joy is a wholly unique blend of folk, country, and jazz; its songs range from free-meter solo performances, to droning dirges, to tasty country-pop tunes. Tons of fantastic Toronto players perform on it, Ryan's singing is amazing, and I've really never heard anything like it. Totally great.
 
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Giles Roy (Woolworm)
Album choice: Grace Under Pressure by Rush



I may later regret not saying something by Neil Young or whatever, but I have to follow my heart here. If you don't like Rush, then just… fuck you, buddy. With this album, they struck the perfect balance between their surprisingly dark new wave sensibilities and their nerdy prog tendencies, making it quintessentially my shit. It's focused and poppy throughout but consistently interesting, culminating in "Between The Wheels," the band's hardest reggae song by a mile. It's also profoundly uncool, and therefore classically Canadian.

 
Carla Gillis (Overnight, the Lord Almightys, formerly Plumtree, music editor at NOW)
Album choice: Blue by Joni Mitchell



My favourite Canadian album is Blue by Joni Mitchell. No other album has lyrics as good: vivid, gutting, all her own, poetry without pretension. Her voice, well, do I even need to explain? Her piano lines? Those unusual guitar chords? And the songwriting — so instinctual and expressive and surprising and moving. 

Plus I have a pretty Canadian story about how I first heard this record. It was 1993 and my teenage rock band, Plumtree, had just started up, and some of the Sloan guys saw us play our first 19+ show in a Halifax bar. Shortly after that, Chris Murphy asked us to his house (his parents' house, actually) to make a four-track recording.  

We worked on it all afternoon, and then when we were getting ready to leave, Chris took my sister (Lynette, drummer) and me down the hall to see his record collection. Lynette and I mostly only knew about Cape Breton fiddle music, the Mini-Pops and heavy metal. Chris had all this stuff we'd never heard of. The Smiths. The B-52s. Minor Threat. He got really excited talking about it all and gave us shopping bags full of vinyl to take home. 

Including Joni Mitchell's Blue. Eventually I gave him back his copy, but I've never stopped listening to my own. Also Sloan's version of "A Case of You" is just terrific.  
 
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Richard MacFarlane (1080p Collection)
Album choice: 2112 by Rush



It simply does not get better than this!
 
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Tim Clapp (Tim the Mute, Kingfisher Bluez)
Album choice: Love Tara by Eric's Trip



"I played Love Tara by Eric's Trip on the day that you were born." I was only 13 when I heard Gord Downie sing that on the closing track off The Tragically Hip's Trouble at the Henhouse but already I was completely obsessed with Eric's Trip. The instantly seminal "Have Not Been The Same" book had made history of Canada's pre and post grunge glory years. Alongside familiar oldies like The Hip and goofballs like Barenaked Ladies, the long-haired Sonic Youth-loving slackers in Eric's Trip seemed positively dangerous. When I finally managed to find a cassette of "Love Tara" at a Salvation Army thrift store, I was already in love. The opening track "Behind the Garage" begins the story of a love being torn apart through the voices of Rick White and Julie Doiron, both the subjects and singers of the songs. Something else changed for me, when I heard the sound of the garbage truck backing up behind the garage, the dogs barking, the whole sense of place of the album, it made me realize how you could make a real heartbreak sound real. To record the entire room, and not the sterile sound of a studio, captured an entire existence on the album — a feeling that I've been trying to replicate ever since.


  Kevin "Sipreano" Howes (Vancouver-based curator, reissue producer behind the Native North America compilation, blogger at Voluntary in Nature)
Album choice: The Black Tie Affair by Maestro Fresh Wes



As someone who has dedicated his life to the study and promotion of Canadian music, repping my favourite Canadian album is no easy task and something that will likely evolve with time as my notion of "nationhood" has. Let's just say that in these days of conservative politics where profit trumps people and the environment, The Nihilist Spasm Band's "No Canada" has been echoing through my brain with unfortunate regularity. While it would be easy to select a still pertinent record from before my era for this piece — albums like Wayne McGhie & the Sounds of Joy - s/t (Birchmount, 1970), Beverly Copeland (CBC, 1970), Willie Dunn - s/t (Summus, 1971), Mashmakhan - The Family (Columbia, 1971), Doug Randle - Songs for the New Industrial State (CBC/Kanata, 1971), Contraction - s/t (Columbia, 1972), and Riverson (Columbia, 1973) all come to mind — I'd like to select something that I actually copped at the time of release, The Black Tie Affair by Maestro Fresh Wes. For those not in the sample-based rap loop, The Black Tie Affair was Maestro's follow-up to his Canadian game-changing debut LP, Symphony in Effect (featuring the all-time classic "Let Your Backbone Slide") and saw the Toronto-born/North York and Scarborough-raised rapper delve even deeper into truth, soul, and consciousness. Re-enlisting the production duties of brothers Anthony and Peter Davis (a.k.a. First Offense, known for their work on Symphony), as well as Main Source's K-Cut, the beats, bar a superfluous remix of "Private Symphony," suitable for bubble baths if nothing else, hit harder than hard with a noticeable jazz and funk influence. Leadoff single "Conductin' Thangs" saw Maestro pay tribute to his Guyanese/Caribbean heritage with an upbeat ska-inspired rhythm track along with his trademark fast rap style. While "V.I.P.'s Only" has a rare guest appearance from the legendary K-4CE, tracks like "Poetry is Black," "The Black Tie Affair" (featured on the essential John Bronski curated Cold Front compilation, also from '91), and "Watchin' Zeroes Grow," all provide ample food for thought. Still, it's "Nothin' At All" (featuring veteran Jamaica-Canadian vocalist George Banton) that struck a chord in my young mind and provided the source of much inspiration.

"Nothin' At All"

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm about to introduce
A smooth groove that I just produced
So don't dance or prance, move your head to the rhythm
As we scan this land that we live in is plagued with racism
C A N A D A, Canada I'm watchin' it decay everyday
Young minds are bein' mentally crushed
And mushed in, thanks to men like Rushton
And others who wanna smother the dream
Of a black-mind revolutionary regime
We gotta redeem ourselves from the chain
By removing all stains of the chain on the brain
We gotta roll with force
Cause the Klan also move in the Great White North
We gotta hurdle the system
Cause hate penetrates multiculturalism
Listen, I want an explanation
Why are Mohawk's bein' kicked out of their reservations
And bein' put in misery
You're stealin' their land to create sporting facilities
The Native man of the land is who you're killin'
And then got the nerve to celebrate Thanksgiving
Claiming every man is equal
I hate to see what y'all got planned for my people
I tell my brothers and sisters to read the signs
To open their eyes cause it's time
To get together, no time to stall
Cause without togetherness we got nothin' at all
Brother, brother
We got nothing at all
Nothing at all
Brother, my brother
We got nothing at all
Nothing at all
My first album, Symphony In Effect, went platinum
In Canada, that made me the first black one
To ever reach that goal
I even got offered a movie roll
I turned it down, I didn't wanna be no star
Portrayin' a nigga that dwells behind bars
They wanted me to act like a prisoner
That ain't positive at all, that's just givin' a
Negative image of black man, forget it
L.T.D. what did I tell 'em, "I ain't with it"
I'd rather work on my sound, and stay down
And move and groove with the underground
God gave me the gift to write
I shed light on the on the blind with a rhyme when I recite
A fresh poem on a page or stage or a story or glory
Not derogatory
I never walk the streets with my nose high
Frontin' like I'm so fly, I never pose high
Why, cause I made a little money
I'm still viewed as an S L A V E see
It doesn't matter how good you can rap jack
It doesn't matter how much money you stack
Cause your black, without knowledge of self you're trapped
And gonna fall
With nothin' at all
Brother, brother
We got nothing at all
Nothing at all
Brother, my brother
We got nothing at all
Nothing at all
Check it out
Third verse, how should I start this
I'll talk about my homie Egerton Marcus
A brother from Toronto who's goddamn great
Olympic middleweight, champ in '88
He excelled to the second highest level in Korea
Bringin' home a silver medal
Made the papers for a couple of days and that was it
Huh, the media wasn't sayin' shit
To keep it short and keep it simple and plain
If Egerton was white he'd be a household name
With commercials and endorsements, like Shawn O' Sullivan
Livin' large and everybody would be lovin' him
Well he's my brother so I give him recognition
I sell a lot of records so the kids are gonna listen
To all the boys and girls
Ben Johnson's still the fastest brother in the world
Don't let the media dictate, be pro black
Cause Jimmy Swaggart got his TV show back
Therefore, we as a race should support
Black achievement never let society distort
Your mind away from comprehension
Cross-cultural pride is what I'm tryin' to strengthen
And lengthen, I want you swingin' to my melody
Just last year the Miss Canada was ebony
To the blacks, the whites, yellow, and browns
Maestro Fresh-Wes is down
With everyone, but I must say loud
Like trash I'm black, and god dammit I'm proud
To be able to reach and teach while I cash checks
Tour all over the world and collect respect
In every area puttin' my fans in hysteria
Show 'em the black man was never inferior
Now everybody's gotta do this
So right about now I say peace to Lennox Lewis
Oscar Peterson and Salome Bey
Michee Mee and her phat DJ
L.A. Love, and my man K-4CE, and of course
My brother K-Cut from Main Source
Self Defence and Ebony MC
And the pimp of the microphone, HDV
First Offence and my man Mr. Metro
For bein' down with the Maes from the get go
With support from y'all there's now way I could fall
With nothin' at all
Brother
You know what I'm sayin
Brother
We got nothing at all
Nothing at all
Brother, brother
We got nothing at all
Nothing, nothing, nothing at all…

In today's streamlined digital age, it's almost impossible to think that a song and video like "Nothin' At All" would be televised on a national broadcaster, and it was for a short period thanks to MuchMusic, who prior to its current Much incarnation actually played music videos. Unfortunately, without a "Let Your Backbone Slide," The Black Tie Affair didn't fare as well as Symphony in Effect on the retail level and those in search of their next pop fix quickly forgot the album, which only reached 20 on the Canadian RPM charts. Perhaps that was the point. This one was for the heads. Almost 25 years after its release, I still find myself listening to The Black Tie Affair on the reg. Lyrics like "Cross-cultural pride is what I'm trying to strengthen," have informed my archival music work on projects like the six-album Jamaica-Toronto series and the more recent Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966-1985 compilation while references to artists like Salome Bey have actually made me investigate this trailblazing singer and activist. Check her out! Despite the theft and atrocities that this country was founded on, Canada is comprised of a wide range of people from all over the world. This is a good thing. Together with the Indigenous people of this land, we have a lot to share and learn from each other. Racism, as we know, is front-page Canadian news in 2015. It's clear to see that an open and positive, however challenging or difficult, dialogue is needed to improve our relationships with each other. Music can certainly help with this. For artists courageous enough to take on social commentary in their craft, there is an opportunity to help foster unity and togetherness. With songs like "Nothin' At All," Maestro Fresh Wes did just that. This is why The Black Tie Affair is my favourite Canadian album. "Let's give it up for the Maestro!" PEACE.

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