When you drop the needle on A Mountain is a Mouth, the self-released debut from Toronto's Bruce Peninsula, expect to be whisked away to a place of strange nighttime noises, imperfect coastlines, and pine cones crunching beneath your feet. The entire album holds the rugged natural beauty of the Canadian wilderness. Intertwining gravelly lead vocals with earth-shaking choral harmonies, all draped over a dense thicket of multi-faceted melodies that draw from a broad palette of folk, blues, roots and rock influences, the group's 12 members achieve a robust esthetic connection with nature. Even the name of the band, which refers to the densely wooded landmass that juts out between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, evokes escape from an oppressive urban environment.

“I think that music, and art in general, offers an alternative space, however temporary,” says Matt Cully, one of the band’s five core members. “The record only lasts a certain amount of time and no matter where it takes you, you’ll always be back where you started. But with our record or anyone’s record or even experiencing and participating in culture in a city, it allows you to find a place for yourself that is in spite of the towering metropolis around you. It’s not a total escape, but it offers a brief glimpse at a mood, a calming mood.”

“There’s definitely a connection, thematically and musically, with nature,” he continues. “For us, that’s the Ontario North and Bruce Peninsula is included in that sort of picture. As the songs unfolded, too, more and more, this connection between the music and our sort of more maybe imagined rural space, where we could imagine playing these songs or sort of kicking back in a less urban environment, the name sort of just stuck and made sense.”

Considering this organic, earthy motif, it wouldn't be a stretch for an unprepared listener to expect an album of intentionally degraded quality, in keeping with the so-called “lo-fi” approach. In reality, the band opts for a clean-sounding approach using modern equipment. Eschewing the indie community's intense (but often needless) tendency to fetishize analog recording, Bruce Peninsula finds other ways to sound old-school.

“The listener is exposed to so many different kinds of music, so many different production styles, so many different eras of music, it would be really disingenuous to set up a tape recorder that hisses or have us singing over a scratchy old record,” explains Cully. “To me that feels really contrived, so instead — and hopefully this came across — we tried to use every modern style. We recorded it digitally just like any other band concerned with being modern would, but we learned from those old recordings and brought certain elements to the fore, primarily strong group singing harmony and stuff like that.”

Indeed, as the initial impression wears off with repeated listens, A Mountain is a Mouth feels more and more like a patchwork étude that approaches not just old folk or blues, but all styles — from gospel and soul to hard rock and even modern pop — with the same fastidious attention to detail. In all likelihood, this approach stems from the fact that, while the band was taking shape, Cully was immersed in the work of 20th century American musicologist Alan Lomax, who devoted his life to chronicling a cornucopia of musical traditions. In fact, many of Bruce Peninsula's songs are rooted in recordings made by Lomax for the U.S. Library of Congress.

“[‘Satisfied’] is from a recording that’s labeled as 'unidentified,' and it seems to be little children in a schoolyard singing a skip-rope song,” Cully explains. “One interesting part of the recordings is that you often hear Lomax talking with the person about what the song is about or where they learned it or how long they’d been playing music or sometimes just interacting with them. So in this case, he gets the girls to sing the song and then asks them to sing it twice as fast the second time. So they do it again and they sort of screw it up and it’s just a really interesting artifact.”

So, if someone issued the same challenge to Bruce Peninsula during one of its live shows, would the band be up to the task?

“Probably,” he says with a laugh. “We’d be exhausted, because we actually play it live right after ‘2nd 4th World War,’ just like it is on the record, but if someone was like ‘Now play it double-time!’ I guess... yeah, we’d be obliged to do it.”