“It takes a good friend to say you’ve got your head up your ass,” sings guitarist/vocalist Warren Spicer. Looking at the freaky friends they’ve assembled for Parc Avenue’s cover shoot, Spicer and his colleagues (drummer Matthew Woodley and multi-instrumentalist Nicolas Basque) were likely egged on to push the boundaries of their folk rock. That means grabbing any instrument they can wrap their fingers around, inviting brass and strings sections and navigating carefully between African grooves, Harvest-era Neil Young backbeats and jam-band territory. It’s not surprising at all when they stop a song cold with a piano coda featuring a seven-year-old boy singing in French or with a choral round accompanied by medieval flutes. For a trio that didn’t play outside of Montreal for the first six years of its existence, Plants And Animals sound like they’re ready to stop noodling around and take on the world. Parc Avenue begins on a bombastic note, with a huge choir leaping out of the speakers a mere 10 bars into the opening track; soon enough, Spicer starts straining and distorting his high notes much in the same way Win Butler does on Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.” (That band’s Sarah Neufeld provides string arrangements here.) Though Parc Avenue is undeniably epic, Plants And Animals take a casual approach to their sound, stuffing the songs with structural shifts rather than browbeating us with grandiose statements. Lyrically, however, Spicer could stand to make a statement or two; much of his lightweight, rambling narratives don’t survive the spontaneity of the moment he scribbled them down. It’s the only real indicator that Plants And Animals are still emerging from their incubatory period, evolving slowly from their trippy, instrumental origins. [www.secretcityrecords.com]
—Michael Barclay
