When a band records their second album in a live-in music-making wonderland called Friendship Cove, name that album Family and slap an adorable group portrait on the cover — including a puppy, for fuck’s sake! — you’d expect them to be twee-er than twee. Nope. Instead, Think About Life skew stranger than sweet. The Montreal trio of Martin Cesar, Matt Shane and Graham Van Pelt bring abstraction and Van Pelt’s prodigious arranging to a hyperbolic sweat-ball indie-rap paradigm also occupied by Philadelphia’s Yah Mos Def and Toronto’s defunct Ninja High School.

The band have said before that Think About Life doesn’t make sense without an audience, and Van Pelt tells me that before recording Family they tested everything live in an attempt to make the record “as danceable as possible.” Their pal-party gestalt is traceable to their immersion in Friendship Cove, the residence/gallery/rehearsal space/recording studio and venue that was co-founded by Van Pelt (who is also the guy behind Polaris Prize finalist Miracle Fortress) and visual artist (and occasional EYE WEEKLY contributor) Jack Dylan. After arriving in Montreal from Stratford, Ontario, and having tried the communal creativity thing with a previous project, The Electric Tractor, Van Pelt and Dylan instituted the two-storey Cove loft above a bike shop in the city’s Griffintown neighbourhood. Griffintown, which is south of Montreal’s downtown, is a somewhat isolated, mostly Anglo, industrial cum “upscale-grocery-store” area.

“We were there from the beginning,” Van Pelt says of Think About Life’s origins in the space, which has hosted innumerable local and touring acts such as Sunset Rubdown and Japanther, and which also housed a constant rotation of Montreal’s electric youth. Artists including rapper Giselle Numba One, Matilda Perks from Valleys and Philip Clark from A/V were expected to work the door, tend bar and clean up after gigs. The live shows helped to subsidize Friendship Cove’s studio and living costs, but Van Pelt describes the main benefit of living there as being able to “meet everyone in the music community that way. You meet everybody in every scene.”

In a 2007 interview with EYE WEEKLY, Van Pelt characterized the once distinctively side-project-ish Think About Life as “a joke band that became serious.” And Family is significantly more accomplished than their first record. “We spent a lot more time on it than we did on [their 2006 self-titled debut LP],” he now explains, “and the three of us definitely collaborated a lot more closely. The results, I think, are a lot more interesting.”

The living-breathing intensity doesn’t hurt, either: “A lot of our best shows we’ve played at Friendship Cove and the next day we’d record the stuff we did in the same room. You get a lot of that immediacy. For better or worse, it gives you the opportunity to pore over your material for 13 hours a day.”

As it happens, Family comes out as the band, after gigs with Wolf Parade and Art Brut, have left the Friendship Cove fold. “We ended up passing [the space] on to a younger generation of kids; like, 20, 21-year-old kids who are running it now and doing all their own projects there. We moved [our studio] out right after we finished this album. It’s still going as Friendship Cove.”

Van Pelt himself moved out of Friendship Cove eight months ago; Shane had lived there briefly, but also no longer does. The “younger generation” may be just a few years younger than Van Pelt and friends, but the evolving intentions of the space are obvious. Friendship Cove is now being run by Arin Gintowt, an art student and Friendship Cove denizen of two years who’s been emphasizing a more noise– and punk–leaning program.

Van Pelt figures the space has three or four years left — Griffintown is in the midst of gentrification, and Friendship Cove has already escaped demolition once. In almost no time, the space has established itself as part of the live/make loft continuum, a major part of the show-going experience that, despite its popularity in Brooklyn or Montreal, we seem to have less of in Toronto. In this city’s perennial obsession with communities and utopias of our own, a Friendship Cove–style enclave is something to consider.