Best Canadian album of 2012? Japandroids’ Celebration Rock

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"Remember saying things like we'll sleep when we're dead, and thinking this feeling was never going to end?" The fist-pumping poets of Japandroids do. Better than that, on the album Celebration Rock and the song Younger Us, the chest-bursting Vancouver duo remind anyone who forgot that feeling. Affecting, memorable works this year have come from artists all over the country, from Quebec (Leonard Cohen, Elfin Saddle, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Luyas), from the Prairies (Erin Passmore, Del Barber), from Ontario (Kathleen Edwards, Metric, Jason Collett, the Slakadeliqs, the Tragically Hip, Gentleman Reg, Danny Michel), from the East Coast (Ruth Minnikin, Mike O'Neill, Old Man Luedecke, Amelia Curran) and from outside the borders (Neil Young, A.C. Newman). If a choice must be made as to Canada's superior album in 2012, however, the trophy goes to Celebration Rock. It is a cue to live, a fuzzed-out exclaim, an overfull dose of 17ism. Rock 'n' roll, in other words.