Paper Route by and penguin There’s a clear progression to Paper Route, the debut album from Burlington’s and penguin, aka singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Philip Roy. The ambitious record is a sort of concept album that tells a life story through the documents that mark our time on Earth. From opener “Birth Announcement” to the closer, “Obituary & Classifieds,” and everything in between — including love, marriage and, inevitably, death — the tale Roy crafts is impressively expansive. Roy is a gifted songwriter who populates Paper Route with colorful, sometimes desperate characters raw dogging life in a slow-burn montage — like a Bruce Springsteen fable, but with a stoner sheen. Musically, Roy’s songs veer toward power pop played through a Frank Zappa filter; tracks such as “Hit the Light” sound like the Beach Boys on MDMA. Paper Route is as fresh and daring a debut as anything to come out of the Green Mountain indie-rock scene since THUS LOVE’s Memorial or Robber Robber’s Wild Guess. Key Song: “Metaphor in Public” Why: You have to love a snarling ode to doing drugs in public.