Glamorous Indie Rock'n'Roll

So, we will be doing a big Brits post tomorrow (like everyone else) although it must be said already that James Blunt winning Best Pop may even outdo Joss Stone winning Best Urban last year in comic awfulness.
But anyway, in the meantime there are other awards going on - nominations for the Shortlist New Pantheon prize have been announced (from the link, scroll down quite a lot, there's also a Patrick Wolf story along the way). Basically a rough attempt at a US equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize (although it's not restricted to US albums, preventing a repeat of the Antony & The Johnsons arguments), they are as follows:

Animal Collective - 'Feels'


Antony and the Johnsons - 'I am a Bird Now'


Fiona Apple - 'Extraordinary Machine'


Arcade Fire - 'Funeral'


Bloc Party - 'Silent Alarm'


Death Cab for Cutie - 'Plans'


The Decemberists - 'Picaresque'


Kings of Leon - 'Aha Shake Heartbreak'


M.I.A. - 'Arular'


Sufjan Stevens - 'Illinois'


I like more than half of these albums a lot but Pitchfork sum up its biggest flaw pretty well themselves - 'Looks a lot like Pitchfork's year-end list, doesn't it?'. The only way it could be any more predictable would be if Clap Your Hands Say Yeah hadn't somehow been misinterpreted as Kings Of Leon. And the idea of only including albums which have sold less than 500,000 copies (roughly equivalent to 100,000 in UK terms I think, which I'm sure that Bloc Party and even the Arcade Fire have easily surpassed here by now) is kind of noble but in practise, it's hard not to think, very wrong.
I may have been, erm, strongly disappointed when Joss Stone was nominated for the Mercury but, given that no-one really gives it that much credit as a rank of quality, the presence of the likes of Hard-Fi, Kaiser Chiefs and Coldplay (although surely three times was unnecessary in their case) lends the award its only real point.
Plenty of people who hadn't heard of The Go! Team, never mind Seth Lakeman or Polar Bear, tuned in to find out if one of the better known acts would win and at least some of them must have heard something that they liked - I know that that's how I found out about The Delgados a few years back, and the latter two I had never heard of before their nominations despite counting myself at least fairly knowledgable on new British music.
Perhaps its a misconception as to the level of public awareness of some of the nominees (after all, from the internet music world it would be easy to get the impression that M.I.A. is really successful) but it seems like there is barely any such split between the Pantheon nominees, with no mainstream acts or complete unknowns, just the usual indie acts, leaving them doomed to be talked about by people like me who are already familiar with all the nominees and probably past the stage of massive enthusiasm for them. Case in point.