The Pets

LOVE AND WAR

(Endearing)

Canada has long been a bastion of the kind of wired AM-style pop that brings to mind sugar-high-riding kids like Sloan, the Flashing Lights, the Salteens, and Thrush Hermit. And the Winnipeg indie label Endearing has been a haven for this sort of stuff, providing a genre-specific stamp of quality for bubblegum-chewing lovers of melody-heavy pop that's equal part fizz and fuzz.

Endearing's latest entry is the Pets, a foursome of epic-minded pop-collagist Frankensteins from Steinbach, Manitoba, who assembled this stunner of a debut entirely on their computer hard drives. They then fired off a CD-R of their creation to a couple of Winnipeg campus radio stations, and Love and War went to #1 locally, landing the group a deal. The album is an audacious tour de force bursting with vibrant, loosely conceptual pop songs that, like the Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, weave together elements of swirling psychedelia, cut-and-paste found sound, and prog-rock arrangements. Tongue-in-cheek candlelight pledges ("A Lighthearted Lovesong") give way to Beatlesque tales of escape and discovery ("Sunshine Shining," "On to You") and only half-kidding meditations on life and death and, uh, love and war (the 10-minute closer, "Welcome to the End of the World", includes snippets of machine-gun fire and newscast reports of carnage à la Simon and Garfunkel's "7 O'Clock News/Silent Night").

-- Jonathan Perry