I’m not a big fan of instrumentals. Tasteful guitar soloing given its own track in the midst of a record of actual songs tends to annoy me; six listens out of seven, tracks like Radiohead’s “Treefingers” and Pavement’s “5-4=Unity” mar albums with which I otherwise find no complaint; and it doesn’t help that almost everyone’s argument FOR such songs eschews any appeal to actual musical criteria for a screed on how they’re “integral to the structure of the album.” I see nothing wrong with going from “Gold Soundz” straight into “Range Life”; one can eat pie and ice cream without stopping for Brussels sprouts on the way.

The thing is, though—I don’t mind instrumental albums. Maybe it’s the care necessitated by a band’s commitment to the long haul rather than to two vaguely artsy minutes that sells me; maybe it’s the state of mind I’m lulled into; maybe it’s not having to think about how much I want to sing along to the next song. But as long as we’re not just stopping for breaks in the middle of lyric-drenched albums, I can go wordless all day—as I’ve been doing today with Winter Equinox.

Part of the ever-dwindling crop of Canadian bands not featured in Newsweek sidebars, Winter Equinox actually broke up—for “various reasons”—a little less than a month ago, after two years, one album, eight songs, and just over a thousand MySpace comments. It’s a shame, because Safe and Sound is one of the great unnoticed albums of 2005, gliding through six-minute instrumental after six-minute instrumental with nary a dull or unpleasantly repetitious patch. Winter Equinox combines a vast array of instruments with a gentle, mature restraint: drums stutter, flutes coo, clarinets weep, synthesizers whirl, but the band slips neither into tiresome bombast nor empty minimalism—it simply fills each sonic corner with precisely what is needed, and stops to show off only occasionally, briefly, and deftly. Take “The Queue,” which opens with as catchily heraldic a riff as you could ask for, and pumps it slowly forward through an intensifying but never overbearing wind section. By the two-minute mark, when the rush recedes to give the floor to a single chiming guitar, one’s mental comparisons have gone from Sigur Ros to the Mescaleros, and when everything falls away two and a half minutes later and the darkening river of the song’s long outro begins to flow, one’s thinking only of Winter Equinox.

Surprisingly, the album isn’t strictly instrumental. Vocals appear on two tracks, including “Skies Over Smokestacks,” the album closer and possible highlight. The shortest song on the album, “Skies Over Smokestacks” doesn’t do anything particularly original, but the cushion of night-wind ambience supporting the balleting guitars is minorly sublime, and when the ramshackle drum machine, male-female vocals, and utterly inconsequential lyrics (I’ve been listening to this song all day and I couldn’t quote you a single word) all jump in at the same time, the effect is strangely bracing for something so gentle.

So why is it that I denounce pop-album instrumentals, but praise instrumental-album pop songs? Maybe it’s that Winter Equinox’s vocals are so much a part of the music I don’t notice the difference. Maybe it’s that the concept of an occasional addition to an album’s musical palette rather than an occasional subtraction appeals to me. Or maybe it’s just that there aren’t any Brussels sprouts here. Maybe it’s that there’s never anywhere on Safe and Sound I’d like to be more than where I already am.

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