Vancouver is home to plenty of musical acts, but there are few who fit the description “local band” quite as well as Said the Whale. Anyone who heard the group’s excellent 2008 CD, Howe Sounds/Taking Abalonia, discovered that it was packed with as many West Coast references as indelible melodies. Said the Whale’s two singer-songwriters, Tyler Bancroft and Ben Worcester, have used their craft to explore their individual relationships with the southern coast of British Columbia, with a particular emphasis on the flora and fauna. Enjoying summer’s last gasp on the sidewalk seating of Mount Pleasant’s Gene coffee shop, Bancroft says that he and Worcester didn’t set out to be troubadours of the B.C. landscape: “I don’t think it’s anything we’ve ever consciously done, to write about our environment, but it just kind of seems to be the theme that recurs, that we’ll write about our surroundings and geography.”

“Well,” Worcester reflects, “I generally find that we write about our experience. And I don’t go out to see shows on a regular basis. I don’t go to clubs, I don’t go downtown, and I don’t go do things. Everyone says, ”˜What do you want to do tonight?’ I want to go sit at the beach, or I want to go on an adventure—go hiking somewhere, do something fun and get out. And that’s the experience that I live for, so that’s what I write about. That’s what affects my life, and that’s what I see as the best part about living here; the best quality of life is all the surrounding stuff, and I’m not really into the city life. Some people write about their experience going out to a bar and meeting somebody, and some people write about their experience looking at the city from afar.”

“I’d love to be able to write about meeting someone!” the terminally single Bancroft interjects, to which his bandmate replies, “Yeah, what’s that like?”

“We have to write songs about girls and love!” Bancroft concludes.

In fact, Bancroft has done a pretty decent job of writing a personal ad in musical form with “Gentleman”, a track from Said the Whale’s new Islands Disappear album, although he does undercut his own efforts somewhat by declaring himself “a stupid, boring gentleman”.

Elsewhere, though, the just-released album returns to familiar—which is to say, local—themes. On “B.C. Orienteering”, Worcester extols the delights, and enumerates the dangers of, wandering in the woods, while on “Black Day in December”, he offers a lament for the 10,000 or so trees that blew down in Stanley Park during the devastating windstorm of 2006. “The first wind blowing in/Left Stanley’s soldiers felled and broken,” he sings on the latter number, the title of which is a nod to Gordon Lightfoot’s “Black Day in July”.

“Stanley Park is of such significance in this city,” says Worcester, whose sister Robyn manages the Stanley Park Ecology Society’s conservation programs. “It’s a huge amount of forest right in the middle of the city, and people take it for granted. Driving through is just a part of life; you go over the Lions Gate Bridge, but you don’t actually see the amazing park that surrounds it, and how big it truly is.”

Of course, the windstorm didn’t just knock a few trees down. There was also a human cost, a fact that Worcester and Bancroft discovered firsthand. “The morning after the big wind and the big storm, Tyler and I went to Stanley Park with our friend Vanessa [Heins] to take photos,” Worcester recalls. “We were walking along the path, and we didn’t know what the extent of it was. It wasn’t in the papers yet; it had literally just happened. And we saw maybe 20 to 50 homeless guys emptying out their bags and sitting on the path instead of in the forest in their trees where they hide and live. You know, there’s always a number, hundreds of people, living in Stanley Park all the time. It’s this whole other world of homeless people who have found a home in the forest.”¦ And someone was actually killed in it.”

Occasionally grim subject matter aside, Islands Disappear is a joyful listen. Released by the Hamilton, Ontario–based Hidden Pony label, the new album is just as much a tuneful gem as its predecessor, but it bears a more consistent sound, even as the songs range from the campfire folk of “A Cold Night Close to the End” to the baited-hook power pop of “Camilo (The Magician)” and the indie-rock drama of “Out on the Shield”. Bancroft and Worcester take turns singing lead, and each is an impressive guitarist in his own right. The pair are given able backing by drummer Spencer Schoening, bassist Peter Carruthers, and keyboardist Jaycelyn Brown.

“One thing that I’m really excited about this record for is that it’s the first time we’ve made a record with a full lineup set, whereas the first record, the first half of it was just Ben and I in a studio just kind of seeing what happened, and the second half of the record was various different members,” Bancroft says. “Now finally we’ve got a set lineup. We all recorded together, we all rehearsed the songs together and created the songs together. So it’s something we can all be proud of together, instead of having a keyboardist jump on-board promoting an album that they didn’t actually play on, and stuff like that.”

With its personnel firmly in place, Said the Whale will spend much of the next two months on the road, heading out as far as Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and playing in almost every major population centre between here and there. Past tours of Canada have given Bancroft and Worcester a greater appreciation of just how big this country is, and they’ve also given the two something to write about beyond strictly local concerns. As a result, Islands Disappear features songs set in or inspired by Elkhorn, Manitoba; Emerald Lake, Alberta; and the Canadian Shield.

“One thing that stands out in my mind,” says Worcester, “is the vast space of Northern Ontario by Lake Superior, between, let’s say, Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, when you’re travelling along the lake and it’s snowing, it’s dark and raining”¦Well, it’s not snowing and raining. Sometimes it is, and that’s the scariest, when the lights on your trailer have gone out and you’re afraid you’re going to die. But more importantly, that’s the two days when you have no cellphone service. And the song ”˜Holly, Ontario’, which ends the album, is based on the experience of driving through that space and not having a connection to the rest of the world.”

Featuring little more than Worcester’s reverbed voice and acoustic guitar, “Holly, Ontario” is a haunting affair and it, like the rest of Islands Disappear, is powerful enough to suggest that Said the Whale might be destined to become more than just a Vancouver band after all.