It’s a little more than a week since Bruce Peninsula found itself on the Polaris Music Prize’s Long List for their debut album A Mountain is a Mouth when we reach guitarist Matt Cully by phone. Shortly after the announcement that the Toronto-based band made the first round of finalists for the Canadian music honour, Cully’s bandmate Neil Haverty blogged on their website: “It makes us feel proud and it makes us feel funny.” As for Cully’s take, he says he’s just “very glad” about it. Any “funny” business is “probably all of our sort of natural humbleness or modesty when it comes to this.”

The “this” he’s referring to would be buzz -- something the indie collective has experienced for a two-year stretch now. Their music -- an experimental blend of '70s prog-rock and American spirituals, buoyed by the rough-hewn jubilance of an up to 11-piece choir -- has the national media (see Globe and Mail, Exclaim!, National Post) salivating. The annual critics’ poll in Toronto’s Eye Weekly named them “Destined for Success” two years running. All of this was long before they released an album (their first came out in February), and primarily built off of their reputation for shows in Toronto and Southern Ontario.

“I guess at the very beginning when we were just starting out, the attention we got was good in that it kept us on our toes and let us know we were on some sort of right path when it came to connecting to an audience. And it helped us to follow intuition,” says Cully, who formed the band with friends Haverty and Misha Bower in 2006. A few shows later, the trio had amassed a band of friends -- including drummer Steve McKay, bassist Andrew Barker, and a revolving cast of Toronto musicians such as Katie Stelmanis and Ohbijou’s Casey Mecija -- to make up a roaring choir.

In and around Toronto, Cully says the band “can inflate to 11 people,” though on tour, like their upcoming first-ever trip west of the actual Bruce Peninsula, they pare down to a tight seven (Cully, Bower, Haverty, McKay, Barker, Kari Peddle and Daniela Gesundheit).

Good press has been helpful for sustaining Bruce Peninsula’s morale so far, but when it comes to positive reinforcement, the most helpful cheering section is the band itself.

“You have that many people, it’s like you’re playing to your own audience, because there’s so many,” Cully laughs. “So if everyone’s there and excited, and you’re playing them a new song -- ‘let’s learn it everybody!’ -- and everyone’s really excited about it, well, that’s the best feedback you could ever get for taking it to the public.”

Haverty’s blustery pitchman cadence takes the lead on the bulk of the album’s tracks (though Bower is also prominently featured; her earnest warble on the reflective “Weave Myself a Dress” is one of the stand-outs). But every last member contributes vocally in some respect, and it’s that blasting chorus of voices that becomes the real centerpiece of much of their work.

“The idea of the choir being an integral part of Bruce Peninsula, or Bruce Peninsula as a band itself, was really not at the forefront at the beginning. It was more like, ‘hey, we’re playing music and it’s fun,’” Cully explains.

“I was never in a band before, nor did I really sing,” says Cully, who also works as an event organizer around Toronto. “I’d participated in choirs when I was in public school, things like that,” he chuckles. During the band’s inception, Cully says he’d become fascinated with old recordings of American folk music, especially those in the call-and-response tradition.

“When I started to listen to the old recordings of folk music it seemed like that [choir singing] was a big part of it. It was the participatory aspect of the songs they were singing. It was often everyone’s involved, everyone’s singing regardless of quality of voice. And that gave that sound a very unique and rough-around-the-edges flavour.”

“I think that we tried to capture that amalgamation of different voices rammed into one sound or one choir.”

The result shouldn’t be mistaken with roots music -- and Cully says the band’s even made a point of immersing themselves in more contemporary influences as they turn out new material, some of which they plan to workshop on their western tour. But even if their sound doesn’t remind you of any other band or genre, it should recall an all-out celebration.

“Prior to being in Bruce Peninsula, our group of friends would get together and sing, or just improvise music, basically,” he says. “It was sort of our style of partying or something, really. … We’d go downstairs and drum and sing and yell and play guitars.

“It’s funny, we don’t really do that anymore because we’re in Bruce Peninsula now.”

Maybe it just means that he’s having fun all the time.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Fun in public.”

Canadian tour dates include:

July 7, Winnipeg

July 8, Saskatoon

July 9, Edmonton

July 10, Calgary

July 11, Canmore, AB

July 13, Vancouver

July 14, Victoria

July 15, Kelowna, BC

July 16, Lethbridge, AB

July 17, Regina

July 21, Montreal

July 22, Quebec City

July 23, Ottawa

July 24-25, Guelph (Hillside Festival)

© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.