by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“Human beings are sentient, right? There are different ways of tapping into that,” says Dave Hamelin, the former drummer of Montreal band the Stills, now on guitar and splitting vocal and songwriting duties with Tim Fletcher. “How do people feel? Not how do people feel, but how do people feel? What process is going on?”

Pretentious questions? Perhaps. The quintet (longtime collaborator Liam O’Neil is now behind the keyboards full-time) is, after all, again on the BOM’s Most Pretentious Band list this week, at second place behind the Arcade Fire. But as a strategy for generating music that’s bigger, deeper and richer, for dodging and in fact upending the notorious sophomore slump, it’s clearly successful.

It would be simple to say that the Stills have left the finicky, frosty terrain of Interpol, Franz Ferdinand and the likes for warmer climes, the grand, shambolic realm of the Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips and so forth. But a more evocative way to put it would be that whereas their 2003 debut Logic Will Break Your Heart was a small-screen production etched in precise black and white, the brand new follow-up Without Feathers sprawls out in widescreen, pulsing with colour.

This is apparent within the first few bars of “In the Beginning,” a perfect second-album opener in its triumphant, heraldic quality. “When we came up with this intro, and Liam came up with the piano part, we were like, ‘Okay, this is what we need to do next.’ Because at first, we totally didn’t know where we were going to go with the record. We knew that everything out right now sounds sort of the same—sounds like our last record, you know, post-punk, Brit-poppy, disco-based, ska beats, very cold, angular and sharp. Every critically acclaimed band now sounds like that. We thought, ‘We can’t do that. It’s too boring. Let’s do something that interests us and that we think will interest other people’—but we had no idea what that would be.”

If you’d like an idea what it would be, and in fact is, start with the melancholy songcraft so capably applied on Logic. Then strip away the strains of ’80s British mope-rock and replace them with flashes of Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen, Plastic Ono Band, the Byrds, Rancid, Motown, classical, cabaret and, above all and everywhere throughout, the Clash—specifically, the fourth side of London Calling, where Strummer and Jones kicked back, dropped the snarl and got all drunk, maudlin and magnificent.

Which isn’t to say they’ve turned their back on their first baby. “I think this one complements Logic Will Break Your Heart, it makes it more interesting,” says Fletcher. “You can start charting a journey.”

That journey has taken the Stills to a position of high visibility worldwide, and though it’s come at a steep cost in heartbreak and homesickness, the payout becomes a payoff in terms of authentic emotional resonance.

“Logic was pretty theoretical in what it was positing,” continues Fletcher. “We hadn’t truly lived what we’ve gone through now in the last three years, an experience which has really riddled our minds with all the neuroses we spoke of on Logic. We’ve actually lived them—all the heartbreak we spoke of theoretically, we’ve actually gone through.”

With the Royal Mountain Band at le Spectrum on Saturday, May 13, 8 p.m., $16.50, all ages

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