As we speak, Minneapolis indie-rock band Cloud Cult is crossing the border into Canada for dates in Toronto and Montreal, after which it rolls down through New England to Pittsburgh (for a gig Sunday at Mr. Small's) and then starts working its way west for a date a week later at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif.

There will be a lot of trees planted to make up for that mileage.

"One of the ethical backbones of the band," says leader Craig Minowa, "is environmental ethics and if we can't perpetuate the business in an environmentally friendly manner then we got to re-address how we're running things. We add up the amount of CO2 emissions that we put out from our ground and air transportation and the energy we use on stage and hotel rooms, and we counter that by paying for an equivalent amount of energy being fed back into the grid with sustainable wind power, and we figure out how many trees we need to plant to absorb that much CO2, and we multiply that times four just to be on the safe side and we do that for each tour."

It's a long way from throwing TVs through the hotel window, and it's just part of the band's commitment to the environment. Minowa runs Cloud Cult and its Earthology Records from an organic, geothermal-powered farm in Minnesota using only recycled materials in its packaging and donates all profits to charity.

Fortunately, the band's music is equally worthy of attention. From the start, the 2001 debut "Who Killed Puck?," Cloud Cult has drawn comparisons to dreamy, arty '90s bands Grandaddy and Flaming Lips.

"It's kind of interesting because I had never listened to Flaming Lips," Minowa says. "I had never heard anything from them, and from the first time we started putting albums out, one of the first reviews we had said something like 'obvious Flaming Lips influence' and I was like, 'I've never even heard Flaming Lips! This is so unfair.' But having heard it now I can see the connection as far as high voice and a little bit more experimental, and odd stage show."

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Through five albums, Cloud Cult has framed Minowa's high, fragile vocals and emotional songs with a clatter of noise, electronic beats, chamber music and occasional driving rock, with few limitations.

"First and foremost," Minowa says, "the reason that Cloud Cult started up was for the love of music and I like to write music more than just about anything. And so when it's composition time, there isn't a whole lot of thought given to trying to stick to any one genre or trying to stick to any stipulated instrumentation. It's just writing for writing and trying to see what comes out of that process."

Thematically, the music has not been for the faint of heart. The shadow over Cloud Cult's catalog was the sudden death, in his sleep, of Minowa and wife Connie's 2-year-old son, Kaiden, in 2002. Minowa poured his grief into prolific bursts of songwriting, many dealing directly, excruciatingly with the loss. A song from the band's acclaimed 2007 album, "The Meaning of 8," was a fantasy called "Your 8th Birthday."

Minowa says that with Cloud Cult's most recent album, "Feel Good Ghosts," the vision is more hopeful.

"The albums sort of follow their own sequential story line and 'Feel Good Ghosts' was sort of a natural progression coming out of 'Meaning of 8,' where I was finally coming to terms with the loss of our son and kind of rebuilding life and spirituality and perspective in life, and recognizing the necessity of adjusting your perspective in a way that's optimistic and hopeful. We're lucky to be in the spot where there's a fair chunk of people listening to the music and I don't want to propagate something negative. I want to put something out there that's hopefully going to create little snowballs of positive energy."

Meanwhile, the band's critical buzz -- and talked-about stage show that includes Connie and another artist finishing a painting and auctioning it off after the show -- is starting to translate slowly but surely into a bigger fan base.

"It's to our benefit that things have been slow growing," Minowa says. "We've been doing this for a while now and 'Who Killed Puck?' came out 10 years ago, and it's been a slow, gradual process. I do equate it to organic farming in the sense that maybe the plants don't grow as fast as those that are doused with synthetically fertilizers, but the roots are deeper and we're not going to get blown over by a drought or anything like that."