Think About Life Figure Things Out

Halfway through "Money," the fifth track on Think About Life's self-titled debut, you'll ask yourself: "When did Nick Diamonds, Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire get together to record an album, and why haven't I heard it before?"

The Montreal band's debut is a little harder to pigeonhole than that, but there are undeniable elements of their hometown associates' music on the disc. Namely all the best ones: infectious melodies, haunting keyboards and superb harmonies.

A band that started with just a distorted Casio keyboard and drums to provide entertainment for a house party have now toured North America with the likes of Wolf Parade and Art Brut.

"We were basically just fooling around on this cheap, crappy keyboard that's about a foot long," keyboardist Graham Van Pelt explains. "The tone of it was pretty exciting.

"It was this crazy harmonic distortion thing. Anytime you blended two notes together on this Casio keyboard, it would create this eruption sound. We ended up getting hooked on it and writing a bunch of pop songs around it.

"For the most part, the main thing was not playing guitars — when I typically did before this — forced me to go with whatever happens rather than try to write something beforehand. We would just plug things in and something would happen. Then we'd just have to try to remember how to do it."

The last puzzle piece to the sound turned out to be Donkey Heart singer Martin Cesar, who Van Pelt and drummer Matt Shane teamed up with to record the band's Alien 8 release. Van Pelt brought his stellar pipes and the idea to layer harmony on top of harmony to give the band their second unique sound.

"Martin, who we were lucky enough to find as a singer, we invited him in to sing and he initially just sang on a few recordings," Van Pelt recalls. "But he would do all his vocal tracks in one take, in this one crazy moment.

"But he'd do one take, then he'd do a harmony, and then another harmony. He had a knack for it, so we incorporated them into the songs. Eventually I started writing my own harmonies with him."

Then there's the matter of the name. In an era of one-name and "The" bands, the group settled on three words that are highly memorable. Like most things with the trio, the name Think About Life came as organically as anything else.

"We wrote a song called 'The Ugliest Thing Of All Time' because it had this really bad keyboard line that had a completely formless chord structure that made no sense," Van Pelt says. "And then, the way we write our songs is, we have a white board with a chart and we name each part. There was a part in the song where we realized what we were doing, and it was really quite beautiful. We fell into this moment with this tragic chord and we called it the 'Think About Life' part because it instigated this deep moment between us.

"Then, you know, we just ended up naming the band after it."

Think About Life play Rouje in Quebec City on Thursday and Casa Del Popolo in Montreal on Saturday.