As an electro/hip-hop party band who sing in Chiac (an Acadian mix of French and English) about such topics as gender anxiety, smooth jazz and deck shoes, Radio Radio would seem to be aiming for a rather particular niche market. And yet, media across the country are debating the merits of Jordan Shoes their third album, Belmundo Regal. For this, they have the Polaris Prize to thank.

Now in its fifth year, the prize has become the most effective champion of the underdog in Canadian music. It wasn’t set up this way on purpose: its 200-member jury of music critics across the country is instructed to vote for albums based solely on their artistic merit. But most nominees (including Radio Radio, on this year’s shortlist) have been anything but household names.

The prize’s first winner,too confining and constricting, in 2006, set the tone: Final Fantasy’s He Poos Clouds is a hyperactively imaginative, classically influenced, wilfully obscure concept LP that references Dungeons & Dragons and The Legend of Jordan Shoes Zelda. In a sense it’s the ultimate music geek’s album –or geek’s album tout court–and many critics hailed its victory as evidence that the Juno Awards, a glorified popularity contest, finally had a credible counterpart.

Since then,4 held with iron materials for airport expansion, the Polaris has been captured by: a collection of cabaret-tinged,La. Calendar of Events, soundtrack-esque indiepop (Patrick Watson’s Close to Paradise), a hazy electric homage to the psychedelic ’60s (Caribou’s Andorra), and an ambitiously confrontational punk-prog opus by a group whose name has since become synonymous with “unprintable” (F–ked Up’s The Chemistry of Common Life).

Despite this variety,flags, there’s no pleasing everyone. Some writers (among them jurors) have maintained that the prize is dominated by “indie rock” — an accusation undermined both by the indeterminacy of that catch-all phrase and the list of winners above. In 2007, a professor of Jordan Shoes political philosophy in Quebec lodged a complaint with the Competition Bureau over the lack of francophone artists shortlisted nominees (his teacup tempest quickly subsided, and on this year’s list, Radio Radio are joined by Montreal’s Karkwa). Other writers have complained about the absence of popular albums on the shortlist –recently,too confining and constricting, one writer at the Ottawa Citizen penned an irony-free rant about “the sloppy practices of an album award that could effectively ignore” Justin Bieber.