Godspeed You! Black Emperor Win Polaris Prize

'Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!' scoops Canadian award

Godspeed You! Black Emperor have won this year's Polaris Prize with their album 'Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!'.

With Canadian music seeming to go from strength to strength, the Polaris Prize has reached international contention. A cross section of the nation's musical output, each year seems to bring with it unexpected flavours, left field styles and sudden diversions.

2013 has proved to be no exception. Fighting off competition from the likes of Feist, Purity Ring and more, post-rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor have won the Polaris Prize with recent album 'Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!'.

Alongside a nifty trophy, the band have won $30,000 which they intend to o projects working with musical instruments and education in the Quebec prison system.

Sadly, Godspeed You! Black Emperor weren't present to accept the award, so Constellations Records boss Ian Ilavsky picked up the prize in their absence. Check out his acceptance speech below: (via FACT)

I have know the band for almost 20 years — they’ve been at it for almost 20 years — and I do know that they want to strongly and unequivocally thank everybody involved in the voting and judging process of Polaris: writers, critics, bloggers, promoters, programmers, radio DJs, and music-makers, label people, industry people, who care about independent music and who think that independent music still has a promise to do something in terms of its choices and its structures and its methods that is counter to the mainstream, not only in the kind of music that we all support, but in the ways that we go about bringing it to people, how we bring it to the marketplace and so forth.

So any of you that know about Godspeed know the choices that they have mostly made and have remained relatively silent about. So Godspeed thanks those people that keep caring about music and writing about it and championing it on those terms and hope that that continues to be part of the conversation and the cultural consciousness we’re all trying to build, by being committed and devoted to independent music, and independent means of production.

Final shortlist:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
Zaki Ibrahim – Every Opposite
Metric – Synthetica
METZ – METZ
Purity Ring – Shrines
Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light
Tegan And Sara – Heartthrob
A Tribe Called Red – Nation II Nation
Whitehorse – The Fate Of The World Depends On This Kiss
Young Galaxy – Ultramarine

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