The Old Soul — Gold

Luca Maoloni, the brains behind The Old Soul's music, is garnering more and more comparisons to Brian Wilson, and it's becoming evident why. Gold, the second disc from the Toronto-based collective (if you don't count their 2006 tour album She's Got Party Davis Eyes — and Maoloni doesn't), is a definitive statement from The Old Soul that bigger is better. The disc starts a bit uncharacteristically with some sampling that Daft Punk would admire on "Old Soul 1," but the group soon revert back to their formula of filling tracks with as many sounds as a listener's ears can handle. While the formula on the majority of Gold will be familiar to fans of the self-titled debut, its songs are just too raucous not to enjoy. It's humbling to think that one man could imagine the majority of these sounds before creating them. Though the disc's music usually trumps its lyrical elements, Maoloni is as talented a wordsmith as he is a musician, penning timeless relationship lines like, "When you made me breakfast in my bed, I knew that I had to run."

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