Photo of Cadence Weapon by David Topping. Earlier this afternoon in the Drake Sky Yard, the shortlist for this year's Polaris Prize was announced. Established by Steve Jordan last year, the $20,000 prize "annually honours, celebrates and rewards creativity and diversity in Canadian recorded music by recognizing, then marketing the albums of the highest artistic integrity, without regard to musical genre, professional affiliation, or sales history, as judged by a panel of selected critics......

Photo by Chromewaves (Frank Yang) in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. One of the best ways to characterize Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, compared to their previous effort, Funeral, came from a review several months back (on a website whose name, sadly, escapes me): where Funeral was dark yet triumphant, Neon Bible "lurches." In tracks like "My Body is a Cage," the title "Neon Bible," and "Intervention," there is a kind of a steady, dark thump......

After rumours and speculation, Arcade Fire recently announced that they would perform at Massey Hall on May 15 & 16. Both shows sold-out in less than a minute. But hopefully those who missed-out on tickets (and are avoiding scalpers) caught their performance on Saturday Night Live this past weekend. The band performed two tracks from their new album Neon Bible (to be released on March 6), "Intervention" and "Keep The Car Running. They also appeared......

Damn it, Arcade Fire, why do you keep teasing us? Beginning at the end of this month (in support of their soon-to-be-released new album, Neon Bible) the band is playing five consecutive nights in three big cities -- and not one of them comes from the Iroquois word for "place where trees stand in the water" (that is, they're starting in London, then in Montreal, and ending in New York). Tickets for all fifteen shows......