Plants and Animals

PLANTS and ANIMALS
@ Les Minots on Thursday, October 5th
starting around 12:30
(just after the Joanna Newsom show)
w/ Seattle's Yo Yo Contingency
and Pennsylvania's Peasant.

If you've heard Plants and Animals you probably already like them. Their first record from a couple years ago is one of my favourite instrumental offerings of recent years. Slick folkified... post-rock in the 90s Chicago vein, organic epic songs, but also modest and smart. Divine earth rock, if you will. Whether or not you know them you're going to like them a lot more once you hear what they've turned into. Warren Spicer is one of the best guitarists in Montreal (and if you like guitarists, make sure you see Joe Grass and Mike O'Brien as well), if not for his shredding skill (which is ample), then for his flat out soul. Plants and Animals have always had a ton of beautiful drunken soul and that's as on diplay as ever in their current incarnation. But between Spicer, the Woodman on drums, and Nicolas Basque carrying the other guitar, the trio has turned into a songwriting machine that appears to crafting something big. Warren is now singing (and spectacularly well), and the rough mixes of a few tracks from an album long in waiting indicate that shit here has really gone next level. Anyone who digs the expansive takenoprisoners crunch of Akron/Family or the acoustic thunder of Tapes n' Tapes (both playing the fest...) will smile wide at the new Plants & Animals. There's still a touch of the great Sam Prekop-like sound, and a healthy dose of the drunken 70 rock ala Dire Straights, suspenders and all. Expect the organic electricity karma levels to be very high.
-- ANDREW ROSE
-- Oct 3, 2006 - Pop Montreal.com

"We're Plants and Animals 'cause we make music that's honest like a dog drinking water or a tree falling on a car and we do it with nothing but two guitars and a drum kit so we're not trying to fool anyone."

So states guitarist Warren Spicer, co-founder of the local folk-jazz-digital-improv trio, who launch their debut disc this week. Spicer's mini-manifesto is the only obtuse thing about the instrumental unit, whose music is at once protean and inexorable (kinda like nature, no?). On a foundation of Spicer's reconstituted guitar licks, looped into mesmerizing motifs, second guitarist Nicolas Basque and drummer Matthew Woodley gradually construct quietly anarchic but ultimately solid sculptures of post-rock jazz and jangle. Guests on strings and brass arrive in a timely fashion, bringing the extended pieces to glorious fruition.

No plants or animals were harmed in the making of the record, though drummer Woodley may have psychic scars from the band's rather unorthodox (and highly unlikely) creative process.

"First, he spent 17 days in a hole he'd dug with a chopstick in a special energy-spring location on Mont Royal, with only a blanket and a dictaphone. During his purification time, he received special ultrasonic transmissions and hummed the translations into the dictaphone. The tapes were given to Nicolas, who transcribed all the melodies into 16-channel MIDI files on his modified Palm Pilot. I received the 62 hours of MIDI files, via the Internet of course, and wrote some folk guitar licks around them that sounded good when I played them over and over again. We went into the studio and the next five days are a total blackout."

While the P&A modus operandi sounds rather dubious, the record unequivocally does not. Now let's see them pull it off on stage. "Make a tricky record and then spend the next year trying to learn how to play it live - that's where it's been for us. I just don't know how we played a year ago in the studio. I'm not even sure we were there at all. Tell you the truth, the record sort of sounds like it could have all been done with MIDI instruments - good MIDI instruments. Computer people making our record and we call ourselves Plants and Animals - what a crock of crap."
-- RUPERT BOTTENBERG
-- Feb 2004 - Montreal Mirror

Friday, October 1
The Green Room, 9 p.m. After briefly looking in on Peterborough’s Money Money at the Pre-Loved boutique — a party that spilled out onto St-Laurent, overlapping with the vernissage crowd next door — I grabbed some food and took a chance at the Green Room. Instead of choosing the trendy hipster gig (The Unicorns), the local band’s last stand (A Vertical Mosaic’s final show) or the bizarro triad of sardonic country, quirky crooner anthems and glorious sleaze (Li’l Andy & Karaoke Cowboy, The World Provider and Frigid), I went the wild card route with three bands I’d never heard. Both Squarewaves and Shoot The Moon were disappointing (and I couldn’t get in to the media-packed Gentleman Reg show upstairs at Main Hall), but thanks to Plants And Animals, all was not lost. The local band played first, having replaced Boy on the bill some time since the festival program was printed. With two guitars and drums, the versatile trio improvised over some loose structures, building from a calm ambient base to bursts of raw, rough noise, somehow averting post-rock clichés. Their vaguely jazzy tangents and long-winded tendencies co-existed comfortably with an eclectic, accessible sound, slowly revealing glimmers of pop sweetness and rock heaviosity.
-- LORRAINE CARPENTER
-- Oct 4, 2004

- Chart Attack

mr. fingers

Dandy had been muttering about plants and animals since she had come back from the desert. Fong had led her into the sands and she had come back with nothing but a sequence of jumbled letters she’d pulled from a crumpled sheet of paper inside a tumbleweed as she’d lain weeping:

N XLV XXI LXXIV’W LXXIII XXXIV LVII

She spent days brooding over the telegraph wire for days before finally intercepting something. A clue she had pulled from the wire on her hunt for the musical genius. It was a message she kept intercepting over and over.

.–. .-.. .- -. - Plants
.- -. -.. and
.- -. .. — .- .-.. … Animals

She ran to her satchel, extracted the crumpled paper. “Of course! The tumbleweed was no co-incidence. They’re GPS coordinates in Roman numerals.”

She poured herself another scotch.

“Give me the code Fong”,? she whispered into her scotch, “Gimme the fahkin’ code.”?

I liked it when she drank scotch. It brought something out in her.

She crushed the glass in her hand.

“Got it!”? she yelled. She sipped slowly from the palm of her hand. N. 45° 3174; 73° 3457- she smiled with bloody teeth.“Get yer paddle”, she said, “he’s on an orange couch in the river.”?

I think he means the street,I told her, looking over her notes. I suggested the Divan Orange on St. Laurent Blvd. Dandy smashed her toe on the way out the door. I followed the trickle of blood to the Divan Orange. The place was full. It was an eager crowd and I was a happy man. The place had the smarts to carry the oatmeal stout. I ordered two. One for the good hand, one for the bad and watched Dandy go into stealth mode.

I expected nothing from the Plants and Animals. I had spent the afternoon at my editor’s office at the hottest spot north of Havana. He was telling me my reviews had been too positive as of late.

“You’re a critic. You need to be critical.”

He was right. I had been very positive as of late but there had been a slew of good shows in Montreal. That’s not to say they were all great, but I usually trust my judgment except around heavy machinery.

And then they made me eat my own glass.

You see, there’s something to be said about musical bravery these days. It’s easy to be clever. It’s even easier to be cute. For every black and white stripe on the indy kids shirt there’s a dozen bands who use cleverness or cuteness as some sort of musical currency. There are few brave bands out there. There are a few Plants and Animals. These goddamned bastards had the gall to play Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. Who the hell did they think they were? They didn’t even have an album yet; their soon to be released Secret City record isn’t due out until the winter. Whoever made them think they could tear off one of the most stinging jazz tracks from the one of the most stinging jazz singers was…well…dead right. The worst part was - this wasn’t even their best song.

This is a band that is not afraid to take chances and not afraid to put it all on the line, an unfortunate rarity these days.

“He’s here!”? she said. Dandy had me by the neck. She was wearing a mask and snorkel. “Billy Fong is here! I saw him! That bastard led me to the desert only to send me right to where I had started!”? I held her tight, then pushed her to the side. She’d been a wreck since the desert. Fong spelled the end of her. She needed Plants. She needed Animals. She disappeared into the crowd. I turned my eyes to the band. If Fong had been here, then it meant this band was on to something. But I didn’t need a renegade child genius to tell me that. - Matrix Magazine

Hailing from the highly fertile Montreal scene, Plants & Animals are poised to make a powerful first impression on the rest of the country. The trio, comprised of guitarist/vocalists Warren Spicer and Nic Basque, along with drummer Matthew Woodley, draw many diverse musical elements into a generally roots-based sound, one that is sure to carve out a unique place among their Montreal peers once their full-length debut album, Park Avenue, is released in January. In the meantime, the Wood, Wires & Whisky tour will provide ample opportunities for audiences to get fully acquainted with the band's indefinable magic.

How do you feel about being a part of the Wood, Wires & Whiskey tour?
Woodley: Terrible! (laughs) No, I think we’re pretty excited. In one of our previous bands, we did some shows with the Acorn, so it’ll be good to play with those guys again.

So I understand you’re hard at work finishing a new EP in time for the tour?
Woodley: Yeah. Our first full-length album, Park Avenue, won’t be out until January, so we wanted to put out something to coincide with all the shows we’ll be doing in the fall. The EP’s called With/Avec, and it’s more like a bite-size teaser. There are four songs, and one of them, “Faerie Dance,” will also be on the full-length. We thought it would be nice to have something people could take home from the shows. Basque: Really, we’re just doing it because we can’t get enough of being in the studio.

The first EP you put out two years ago was fairly acoustic-based. What can people expect from your latest music? It’s already being described as “earth rock.”
Spicer: We’ve decided that we’re classic rock now, or post-classic rock. There are still some rootsy elements to it though, I suppose. The music’s got a lot of energy now, and we like to have fun on stage and get people involved — keep it entertaining for the whole family.

You’re also known for having many diverse elements to your sound as well, such as the Arcade Fire’s Sarah Neufeld, and country singer Katie Moore guesting on the upcoming album. Are you planning on having any extra musicians on stage?
Spicer: Probably not, although we’ve done that before with shows we’ve played in Montreal. It was great to have so many people add to the sonic tapestry of the album, but it’s harder to tour with extra people like that. Still, who knows what will happen? I think though, despite having a lot of different instruments on the record, we can do quite a bit with two guitars and drums live.

Is it a challenge to take what you’ve done in the studio and reproduce it live?
Basque: No, not really. We’ve been playing most of these songs live for some time now, and we understand what they are at their core. So as long as we’re able to stay in touch with what that core thing is about each of them, we’re able to get it across on stage.

I guess I have to ask the obvious question too about being a part of the Montreal scene. Is there still a lot of mystique attached to that?
Woodley: It is kind of interesting that people are still talking about that a few years later. We actually haven’t played much outside of Montreal, but we’re about to now. So not having lived in any other city, or been a part of any other scene, it’s kind of hard to compare. But it’s definitely really good here. People have raised the bar pretty high, musically, and the venues are really fantastic. There are a lot of fans here too, and I guess that’s the first thing we notice whenever we go to another town where people don’t know us.

I think you guys follow that pattern of other Montreal bands in being almost totally unclassifiable. Is that fair to say?
Spicer: Well, I’ve never felt it’s been necessary to define ourselves as anything, even though now I think we’re comfortable calling ourselves a rock band. We’ve kind of grown into that role, but at the same time it still leaves things pretty open-ended.

To get all the tour info head to Exclaim!'s Wood, Wires, & Whisky Tour

--Jason Schneider - Exclaim!

Having hacked their way through the mathy underbrush, the three man-gods of Plants And Animals, cloaked in animal pelts and lilacs, stop their dream horses briefly atop Mont Royal. They plunge down into Lola Who?, careening through rocks and rhythm trees, their hands no longer on the reins but madly and maniacally clutching goatskins filled with devil drink. They pause at the bottom to consider Trials & Tribulations before urging their tribal steeds up the middle of Parc Ave., building the mad momentum of their Faerie Dance until they find a steady groove augmented by a chorus built by their fellow forest-dwellers. After destroying the wildly irreverent Guru/Sinnerman, they hitch their weary mounts to the curb and decadently ravage some poutines at Nouveau Palais.
--Brendan Murphy - The Hour

Montreal band Plants And Animals are totally the next big thing. Or at least they might be. Like, next year maybe. In the meantime, we caught up with drummer/vocalist Matthew Woodley to ask him how the ride has been so far.

ChartAttack: You're going to Iceland. Have you toured internationally before?

Matthew Woodley: No, we haven't. Well, unless you count the United States. But up until quite recently we would just play in Montreal once or twice a month and the odd thing in Toronto. Now that there's a full-length on the way and we've signed this deal with Secret City, things have picked up quite a bit. We played with Wolf Parade in August in the U.S. It was fucking fantastic. They packed the houses and we just had to show up and play to a room full of people. Fortunately, the chances came our way. You know, give 110 per cent, put the puck at the net and things worked out.

So how'd the Iceland thing come up? Was that Secret City's doing?

It was Secret City's doing, yeah. Although we've always had a certain aspiration to play there.

Specifically in Iceland?

Yeah I mean, why not? Hopefully Greenland will follow.

I don't know if there's much of an indie music scene in Greenland.

No. Well, apparently there is in Iceland. They've got a few exports. I've actually been there before, just for a few days, and it's a pretty amazing place.

Are you going to get a little extra time to see the sites?

We're playing something like four times and we're there for six days, so I imagine we'll get a chance to check out the country a little bit. And the festival sounds great. Friends of ours in Patrick Watson's band were there last year and told us lots of great stories.

So what's going on there?

Well, I guess it's all because of the Iceland Airwaves festival which brings in scores of bands from all over the place and tons of Icelandic bands. I know that people go there to play otherwise. I don't think we would have been able to hook that up so easily.

You're releasing the new LP soon. Do you know what it's called?

We're releasing an EP. We're selling it off stage now and I think the actual release date is the 23rd of October or something like that. It's around, but it's not officially out. The EP is called With/Avec, which, I don't know if you've spent much time in Quebec, but that's something you often see in translation. It's a bilingualism. You know, "pizza with/avec frites." We're releasing a full-length in early 2008. It's finished. It was a long time coming, but it's done. I'm looking forward to getting it out there. It's going to be called Parc Avenue.

Wasn't there a campaign to change the name of Parc Avenue in Montreal?

Yeah, that actually doesn't have anything to do with it. Two of us live on Parc. I don't know, maybe it sort of worked its way in subliminally, but there's nothing political about the name. In fact, at the end of the day when all of city hall voted on it being changed, Bourassa's family — it was supposed to be named after the late Premier Bourassa — his family stepped in and said don't change it.

I think you guys have a really special sound. I was reading this quote in Matrix Music magazine and it said, "There's something to be said about musical bravery these days. It's easy to be clever, it's even easier to be cute." I read that and I thought it had a real point. If you're clever it implies this intellectual distance, like you're not really committed to the material. But you guys don't have that cleverness, you're very upfront and committed to your sound. I think it takes some guts to not have a concept to hide behind.

Yeah, I don't think that was ever a question. I don't think we're hiding behind anything. When we play live it's usually pretty straight-up and I'd like to hope that that grabs people. I think that it does. It all goes back to putting the puck at the net, giving 110 per cent. We've been playing together for a long time and I think we know how to listen to each other. And that doesn't mean it isn't smart or interesting, it just means we're not hiding behind a couple levels of ideas or irony.

I think that new bands or inexperienced musicians do that because they aren't confident in their straight-up abilities to sing and play and write songs.
And everybody goes through that.
Maybe not everybody. I think there's this trend where bands seem to be a little bit older now. If you look back, a lot of the bands that we all like and listen to are from the early '60s and '70s, and they were really young when they got going. A lot of bands now who I think are doing well are in their late twenties or early thirties even. Maybe that comes from experience.

How old are you guys?

We're in our late-twenties. Is that too old? When I go see shows — and this isn't a recent thing, I've always been like this — I want to see people who can play, who can really fucking play. It doesn't mean complicated. It can be incredibly simple. That's even more difficult, but I want to see people who can play their instruments well and look you in the eye with their music.

It seems like there's way less emphasis on musicianship these days. When I think about the '70s, there was an emphasis on musicianship, but then electronic music started to phase in and punk and now there's much less interest in hearing good musicians.

Maybe that even comes across as too intellectual for people, which is another weird, twisted irony where cleverness is OK and you can hide behind a certain guise and devices, but if you pull out licks people lose interest. But it really is fun playing in a band where we have what we have and do what we do and can just communicate that way because that's the way we've all been playing all our lives.

Do you think of yourselves as being consciously classic rock-influenced?

It depends. I don't know what classic rock is. If it's The Guess Who, then I guess in a way. I listen to a lot more older music than new music. In that way I don't even keep up on who's doing what all the time. It's kind of a rat race. I just come across things that I really like and listen to those records a lot. But I'm not up in the blogs all day figuring out what the new thing is.

I want to read you this quote from www.iheartmusic.net. They saw Pop Montreal and had this Thanksgiving list of music things to be thankful for. And number five was "Seeing Plants And Animals, Amos The Transparent and The Paper Cranes now, before they're huge at this time next year." So are you going to be huge?

Totally. Greenland. When we get to Greenland then I'll know that we've made it.

-- Evan Dickson - ChartAttack

That making an album is a meticulous process would be no overstatement for Plants and Animals. With their second full-length album, a year and a half in the making, and no immediate release date set, the Montreal trio will chip away on their sonic baby until it fits their vision - no matter how long it takes.

"You'd think that it might get discouraging, but it's really not," vocalist Warren Spicer said about the recording process. "The more we work on it, the more we record, it transforms the record. The more it feels like everything is coming together. Even if we've scrapped [material] and we've invested a

bunch of time and money."

The band started out as Spicer's instrumental solo project in 2001 when the Canada Council for the Arts gave him a grant to produce a record. He recruited his childhood friend Matthew "Woodman" Woodley on drums and Nicolas Basque on guitar, both from the halls of Concordia's music department. Somewhere during the single project a unified band emerged.

While their first and self-titled record was hard to put into a genre (although "uncommercial acousto-electric" was Spicer's own description at the time), the band promises their second record will have immediate appeal to the easy listener. Among the collaborators are Arcade Fire's violinist Sarah Neufeld and country singer Katie Moore, as well as a 7 year-old boy who hauntingly finishes the track "A l'oree des bois", all contributing towards the complex and progressive song structures Plants and Animals carry with them from their instrumental days.

The most obvious change on the forthcoming record will be the addition of vocal tracks, but the band said their songs also take on a lighter, poppier nature.

"It took a while to learn how to [sing] to a point where we were happy doing it," Spicer said. Using vocals was a learning process for them, and one that is largely the reason for their lengthy recording process. "A lot of our singing was just 'la-la-la's'. And that was pretty disappointing. But then we just kept with it, and we kept with it, and slowly the 'la-la's' started getting replaced by words," he said.

By now, the band feels like they have reached a level where they're no longer creating the "transitional songs" they wrote while moving away from being an instrumental trio. So, even though they estimated they've only finished a "handful" of tracks, they hope the rest will be done by this spring.

"We're becoming what we really are through this whole thing," Spicer said, comparing this record to previous efforts. "We're getting closer to what we're happy with. Before we were just hammering out ideas we call[ed] songs. But they were more like sketches."

"It's no point in putting all that time, and energy and money if it's going to be something that you're not 100 per cent happy about," Basque agreed.

Judging by material posted on the web, there are definitive similarities between this record and the last although the band has changed their approach to record making. While their first album got overwhelmingly good reviews from those that picked it up, Spicer said it was written with only record production in mind. "It's really not a record you can play live."

This time, P&A try their material live on a regular basis.

"I think part of the reason it's taking us so long to finish the record is because a lot of the stuff we develop, and then we try it out live," Spicer said.

"I think you have to do it that way," Woodman added. "We're putting in a more concerted effort to play more - to play more places, to play more often, to have a record that people listen to." Spicer agreed, "If it pulls off live and it works then you know you're onto something."

When they played Pop Montreal earlier this fall, critics again reached for their superlatives to describe the forthcoming material. Exclaim! labeled them "a bunch of good time-enjoying, scarily talented musicians," while Pop Montreal's Andrew Rose predicted they were "crafting something big."

Even though they now put more emphasis on live performance, all three agreed some of their material might never be played live, even if it makes it on to the record.

One of the reasons might be their songs' complexity, making them hard to play live. On their Myspace page fans get a sneak-peak of three new songs, one of which Spicer said maxed out the 24 sound tracks analog recording (as opposed to digital) allows them. The beautifully arranged "Faerie Dance" took Spicer, who also works part time as a producer and sound engineering professor at Concordia, a full four days to mix. The first two days were spent trying to organize the progressive feast, mapping how to get from one part of the song to the next. "It sounds like a waste of time, if you were on digital you could just automate the whole thing, and it would be done in one day," he said, while maintaining that there are other, not so obvious advantages to analog recording.

A digital format allows bands to record a virtually unlimited number of tracks onto a computer, which usually results in recording several satisfactory versions of each element in a song, and then mixing bits and pieces together to get the best possible outcome. Although that might sound like an ideal situation, the shear amassment of material can be daunting when it comes to sorting it out. For Plants and Animals, recording analog "forces" them not to even attempt such a jigsaw puzzle of nuances.

"I think if we had a hundred [tracks], or whatever you can amass onto a computer screen, we'd dig ourselves a big, deep hole," Woodman said with a laugh.

He said their lengthy recording process has earned them a reputation among friends of "striving for perfection that can never exist." That is however not a classification any of the guys will agree to, saying they know when they are satisfied and quickly move on.

"It just has to be good," they maintained, and joked "we're basically just trying to stay alive long enough to finish." However the final product might turn out, Plants and Animals is definitely one band to keep an eye out for in Montreal's ever-hotter music scene.

--IDA JORGENSEN
--November 29, 2006 - The Concordian

Win Butler. Leonard Cohen. Richard Reed Parry. Two of these people were spotted at this show, while one was simply seen eating lunch somewhere else earlier in the day. With the bros and their lady bros taking over lower St-Laurent to gorge and gawk over the F-1 weekend festivities, much of the non-pompous crowd congregated further up St-Laurent, in-between the outdoor Fringe Pop stage and the adjacent Divan Orange. While I unfortunately missed the openers, Woodpigeon, I was equally as unfortunate to catch the Luyas. While they clearly had their fans, I call bullshit. Given that recorded music of theirs, reined in a bit, is entirely more palatable, not to mention the deserved success the members have had in other outfits (Bell Orchestre, Torngat), perhaps it was simply this specific live show that came off as a boring and annoying art installation of shrieking horns and vocals. Thank Christ for the arrival on stage of Plants and Animals, the latest signees to Secret City, home to Patrick Watson and Miracle Fortress. Though entirely different, they share with Watson an anachronistic something or other that places them beside the normal indie fare. Someone suggested “post-classic rock� while someone else cooked up a sentence that included “French� “tribal� and “Phish, but not sucky.� Whatever “it� is exactly, their first song, “Mercy,� took off like a bat out of hell that grew up to be the bandleader of a wham-bam Baptist choir. Known as skilled musicians that play with acts like Timber! and Socalled, among 1,200 or so other bands it seems, in this primary project, what they seem to do is write deeply layered, melodic and rhythmic songs that they then set on fire for their live show. At times guitarist and lead vocalist Warren Spicer seemed to be channelling music like the guy on Heroes who blows the city up. Finishing off with “Bye Bye Bye,� a song somehow reminiscent, awesomely, of Queen, the crowd and band poured back into the street to pound beer and see if Win Butler had stolen any more basketballs.
--Brendan Murphy
--July 2007 - Exclaim!