Guitars with toothbrushes and balloons, bicycles as drum kits and megaphones as microphones; welcome to the eccentric world of Patrick Watson and the Wooden Arms.

The Montreal band’s new album, Wooden Arms, is the highly anticipated follow up to their 2007 Polaris Prize winning Closer to Paradise, and it continues them along a path of no return. New soundscapes have been discovered, extended instrumental techniques are being explored and doors that have been opened can never be closed again. Guitarist Simon Angell explains it best when talking of his experience taking lessons from guitar god Marc Ribot. Instead of opening doors, Ribot showed him a whole building he didn’t even know was there.

“I was in a lull in terms of my musical evolution,” Angell admits. “I felt stuck doing the same tricks for years, and I needed a little boost. The first five minutes of sitting down, Marc asked me if I wanted to play just to warm up a bit, and so I thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to play some jazz standards to ease into it.’ He breaks into this crazy free noise thing, pulling on the strings of the guitar and doing all this crazy shit. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. Okay, here we go. Wait! I can do that?’”

Being able to manipulate your instrument in novel ways but still utilizing it within the framework of pop music structures is a philosophy that is definitely working for the band. Angell and his bandmates — bassist Mishka Stein, drummer Robbie Kuster and leader, keyboardist and singer Patrick Watson — are all on the same page when it comes to pushing the envelope.

“It’s becoming more and more of a band effort,” Angell says. “I see it even more in rehearsals now. It’s much more collaborative. So when we started recording we were conscious about move further away from the dreamscape soundscape type stuff. Robbie was kind of tired of playing drums. He just wanted to bang on shit. We found a real common ground while we were recording Wooden Arms, because we just finished two years together with four guys in a van.”

“The four of us have been playing together for ten years now, and sure it did start out as Pat’s band with us backing him, but it evolved into this four-person machine,” he continues. “But then at that point, the ball had already started rolling and the name Patrick Watson had caught on. All that aside, we couldn’t come up with any good band names anyway.”

Those obsessed with pithy genres used to categorize music can claim Patrick Watson and the Wooden Arms as their new fetish. Watson himself has been quoted as calling what they do "science fiction folk music.” The Toronto Star called them “cracked-mirror pop music”. But cabaret folk pop seems pretty apt if it means you’re channeling the same spirit as Rufus Wainwright and Tom Waits. Certainly, the album’s obvious dualism of lush orchestration and stark simplicity bring Watson under the same umbrella.