Forgive Bruce Peninsula’s bio for reading like a Cancon old-guard checklist. An all-female choir, boasting Ohbijou’s Casey Mecija and Austra’s Katie Stelmanis as alum? Yep. A spot scoring Ed Gass-Donnelly’s Mennonite thriller Small Town Murder Songs? Check. A Polaris nom for its debut LP? You betcha!

Still, that full-length, 2008’s A Mountain is a Mouth, stifled any pre-emptive yawns. Informally led by quarry-lunged howler Neil Haverty, it melded roaring percussion, haunted agnostic gospel and, quite unbelievably, math rock flourishes into a sound delivering platitudes normally reserved for metal acts. Crushing. Bombastic. Relentless. You get the picture.

But if Mountain overwhelmed in its big-band muscularity, followup Open Flames is defined by its dynamism. Don’t call it a reinvention of its sonic palette — “Pull Me Under” and “In Your Light” are glacial-frigid prog numbers, while the pulsating “As Long as I Live” and “Adrenaline” showcase the band’s familiar demented, tribal gospel — but with Open Flames, Bruce Peninsula has retooled its arsenal. Is it louder? No. Is it better? Certainly.

Thank co-lead vocalist Misha Bower. Alternating between bouts of raw power (“Say Yeah,” where she makes herky-jerky time signatures an afterthought) and smoky fragility (see the bummerific slides of “Or So It Seems,” the band’s most country offering yet), Bower’s masterful range rises atop countless layers of choral histrionics. And, at the LP’s most captivating, she leads “Open Flames” from a finger-picked folk ballad, morphing it into a heaving gospel chant, eventually settling into a vocals only hymnal — it’s a jaw-dropping survey of tone, genre and mood. This is progression done right.

MARK TEO

Fast Forward Weekly: Open Flames is a sharp turn from A Mountain is a Mouth — it feels more dynamic yet less overwhelming.

Vocalist/guitarist Matt Cully: For Open Flames, we wanted to both focus the camera and take wide-angle shots — we wanted to play with the possibilities with the band. I felt like when we made A Mountain is a Mouth, people got caught up in the energy of it. But as listeners, it’s a lot to take in, and people told us that. People would tell us, “I could only put it on once a month.” (Laughs.) A lot of music today is about atmosphere and mood — our first album was anti-atmosphere, like a bomb going off.

The title track describes “an open flame / to rid off whatever you’ve got to burn.” Is it fair to say catharsis was a theme for the album?

It’s a metaphor for bringing your problems, anger, grief or doubt to a space for renewal. The symbol of the open flames [provides] the promise of letting go of your past at the danger of losing what the past has made you. And there’s something about that song that ties the album together — and foolishly, we’re still trying to make albums in world that’s trying not to make them.

How do you manage to balance so many creative voices — literally and figuratively — in Bruce Peninsula? Open Flames seems to careen between impressive precision and haphazardness.

There’s definitely a tension between order and disorder in our music. We listen to all different types of music — it’s about celebrating tradition but living in a time that’s always in flux. Personally, I listen to a lot of modern electronic music, which doesn’t fit our sound. But if you peel back that layer, it’s visible in my contribution, and that’s visible for every member. And there’s a tension, too, in loving traditional folk — the magic of having a straightforward song told by a beautiful voice — because our history, and where we live, can’t be contained in that form.