Official CHARTattack 2009 Polaris Music Prize Betting Line

Ooooh, the excitement!

The 2009 Polaris Music Prize will be awarded a few short hours from now so it's time to lay down some bets.

It's impossible to predict how the 11 Polaris Grand Jury members are going to vote, but if you throw a bunch of music critics in a room drunk on the power and drunk on wine coolers, there are some patterns that make sense.

Here, then, are my odds of who's going to win the 2009 Polaris Music Prize:

800-to-1 Patrick Watson — Wooden Arms
As unpredictable as this event is, there's one certainty — Patrick Watson won't repeat the band's 2007 win. Music critics are born and bred contrarians, so jurors will vote down Watson just to make sure he doesn't repeat.

40-to-1 Malajube — Labyrinthes
They're Quebec's Radiohead/Pink Floyd, which sounds great, but the French language barrier is going to keep them down.

39-to-1 Hey Rosetta! — Into Your Lungs (And Around In Your Heart And On Through Your Blood)
A Hey Rosetta! come-from-nowhere win isn't unimaginable. They've got the lowest profile, so they could gain the most from jurors who treat them like an exotic discovery. It won't be enough of a bump for them to win, though.

20-to-1 Great Lake Swimmers — Lost Channels
This album's subtle and elegant, but jurors who like this album are also probably going to like Elliott Brood, Joel Plaskett and to a lesser extent, Chad VanGaalen, creating a clusterfuck that will probably work against all four when it comes to grand jury voting.

12-to-1 K'Naan — Troubadour
Parts of this two-time Polaris nominee's album are spectacular, but once that secret conclave of jurors starts making fun of the fact there's a Maroon 5 cameo and a Kirk Hammett guitar solo, those uncool moments will level off the bump K'Naan would've gotten by being the only hip-hopper on the list.

8-to-1 Elliott Brood — Mountain Meadows
I've got the sneaking suspicion that when grand jurors listen to this album five times in a row they're going to look inside themselves and discover they like the idea of Elliott Brood more than they like the reality of Elliott Brood.

7-to-1 Metric — Fantasies
Polaris trends have shown that whoever's the most popular nominee usually has no chance of winning, so that would logically shaft Metric. But the days of media feuding with Emily Haines appear over and the love-in for Metric is back on. The girl power vote should propel them close to the top, as well, but they'll ultimately be too populist for too many of the critics.

7-to-1 Joel Plaskett — Three
Plaskett's been to this dance before with his amazing teen romance concept album, Ashtray Rock. The concept of Three is bolder, so he's going to get some nods for brave artistry. Unfortunately Plaskett is also a bit of a love-him/hate-him critic divider who's going to be fighting for the same votes as the Swimmers, CVG and Elliott Brood.

4-to-1 Chad VanGaalen — Soft Airplane
The world appears to be CVG's oyster. This is his second time in the running for a Polaris award, Soft Airplane destroyed on campus radio, he's charmingly eccentric and he's got an electro side-project in Black Mold that makes adventurous music fans jizz. A him vs. Plaskett dynamic may polarize the grand jury, a bit though, along with the pointed question "Why is that noise there?" in reference to various Soft Airplane songs.

5-to-2 Fucked Up — The Chemistry Of Common Life
This hardcore prog record is without a doubt the bravest, boldest and most artistically avant album on the list. It's also the only record that even approaches "hard rock," so it should automatically swing votes from any jurors with "the rawk" in them. Add to that the impish delight the music critic community would get from declaring a band called "Fucked Up" the victors and you've got the clear formula for a top contender. The only thing that could potentially hold them back is if, well, the collective grand jurors are soft and don't actually like loud, fast, grinding punk rock.