Northern Exposure: My People Sleeping, 'Take Anything' -- Free MP3

If your knowledge of the Montreal music scene begins and ends with Arcade Fire, it's about time to turn your attention to the depth of talent emerging from la belle province. Thanks to the city's artist-friendly milieu and well-established institutions such as the Pop Montreal festival, the independent scene continues to birth refreshingly experimental acts that don't all stick to a predictable pop/rock formula.

Montreal quartet My People Sleeping is one such discovery -- after releasing a well-received eponymous EP in 2008, they recently returned with follow-up full-length 'Feye,' a collection of hazy, psychedelic tracks that sounds like the score to a particularly melodramatic film.

'Take Anything' embodies the band's self-described "dark and dreamy" sound, anchored by an expressive pipe organ melody that admittedly invites comparisons to a certain other Montreal band. Singer Ruby Kato Attwood's almost-operatic soprano even echoes Regine Chassagne's unique delivery at first, but she's soon joined by bandmates James Irwin and Katherine Peacock (who has since left the group) in some interesting vocal interplay as the beat kicks in and shifts the initial elegiac tone to something a little more urgent.

'Feye' was produced by David Bryant of Montreal underground heroes Godspeed You! Black Emperor -- whose cinematic scope and uncompromising approach to their sonic aesthetic can clearly be felt as an influence on tracks like 'Take Anything', which sound all the more precise thanks to being painstakingly recorded to analog tape.

That's not to say My People Sleeping are simply an amalgam of influences, implicit or otherwise -- while their intriguingly narcotic psych-pop bears shades of the familiar, what makes their music catch the ear isn't everything you've heard before -- it's the small, exacting details you haven't, like the staccato vocal repetition on 'Take Anything,' or the song's gauzy melody that builds to something insistent rather than remaining merely ornamental.

The band claims their music "moves slow, visits the demons... and tells stories." It's tough to beat that explanation for their sound, but the allure of a track like 'Take Anything' is that its ethereal quality also compels listeners to conjure up their very own narrative.

Download: My People Sleeping, 'Take Anything' (MP3)