With successful indie bands streaming out of Montreal over the past couple of years, much has been made about Plants and Animals becoming the next Arcade Fire or Wolf Parade. Part of that might be because on the recently released Parc Avenue, singer Warren C. Spicer’s cracked warble often makes him sound like Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler, but Plants and Animals hardly bite their friends’ sound. “If we were trying to copy one of those bands, then that could have been a problem,” guitarist Nicolas Basque explains, on the line from his Montreal pad. “We’ve always tried our own thing.”

Parc Avenue’s kickoff track, “Bye Bye Bye”, begins with saloon-style piano before launching into its joyous, classic-rock sing-along chorus. Backed by tinkling Autoharp, thudding drums, and a full brass section, the grandiose anthem sets the stage for the orchestral album, which falls somewhere between granola-fed Grateful Dead jams and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Adapting an anything-goes approach to recording the disc, the members of Plants and Animals added as much depth to their music as possible by using a vast selection of instruments and paying homage to a variety of musical styles. Basque admits, however, that there were obstacles that put some goals slightly out of reach.

“We had a lot of big ideas that were reduced,” he relates. “I had this idea of having children singing on one song [“A L’Orée des Bois”]. I pictured this famous boys choir in Montreal called Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal. We could never get them because we didn’t have the money.”

A conceptual compromise on “A L’Orée des Bois” changed Basque’s plans from using a full choir to having a single child on the track, resulting in the album’s most breathtaking moment. After grooving on a laid-back California country riff, the tune fades out with the child’s lone, haunting falsetto set to moody piano.

Parc Avenue took nearly three years to complete, partly because Plants and Animals went through a significant evolution after Spicer, Basque, and drummer Matthew Woodley formed the group while attending Concordia University’s music program in 2003. The trio began as a freeform sonic experiment.

“We started as an instrumental band,” Basque says. “We just got out of music school, so everything was based on concepts and complex music. It was music for musicians.”

As the group progressed, however, it began injecting more melody and structure into its sound. Twenty-minute songs were trimmed and Spicer began singing, which triggered a move toward the approachable pop that Plants and Animals plays today.

“It’s something we always wanted to do,” Basque says of playing rock-based music. “We just had to morph and transform. The first songs we were recording were transitional songs. It’s much more fun now. It was fun in the old days, but we just didn’t know where we were going with it. It’s fun to have songs with a beginning, middle, and end.”

Plants and Animals plays the Media Club on Monday (March 24).