Who knew Stanley Kubrik was doing band photography? Montreal’s Plants and Animals are less creepy than they look
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“I can’t even sit in the lobby of a Holiday Inn without people coming up and hounding me for an autograph,” jokes Plants and Animals drummer-vocalist Matthew “Woody” Woodley during an interview from the lobby of a Holiday Inn outside Hamilton. His sarcasm comes in response to a question about the release of Parc Avenue, his band’s new LP. As evidenced by this exchange, quick-wittedness is a central pillar of the Plants and Animals mandate, which also calls for delicate melodies interspersed with epic riffage and enough swagger to choke a pony.
“It’s very, very, very nice to have the record out,” says the timekeeper, answering frankly this time. “It’s been a long time coming — from when we first started recording and had no idea what was going to happen with it, to finishing it last summer and letting it sit in an oak barrel to age like a fine whiskey... it’s a little bit peaty, which is a good complement to our earthy nature.”
Released on Montreal’s increasingly reliable Secret City label (Miracle Fortress, Patrick Watson), the album is carefully crafted. Demonstrating that lyrics can be artful and literary without being pretentious and overwrought, the trio’s poetry is deftly intertwined with meandering folk-rock ballads. The ebb and flow of the music’s intensity is punctuated by clever bilingual puns, choral interludes and references to French-Canadian culture. At times, it veers dangerously close to being overwhelming — yet the band manages to keep it together.
“At one point,” recalls Woodley, “we had a giant sheet of paper that might as well have been a storyboard up on the wall in the studio at Warren’s [Spicer, front man and lead guitarist] place, where we worked a lot at the end of the project, and it just turned into a big mess. We sort of had an idea to stick to a plan and I guess it served as a guiding light, but there wasn’t a storyboard the whole way through. As Nic [Basque, guitarist] likes to say, writing a song is like the Inuit approach to carving a stone sculpture, where the rock tells your hand what to do.”
With their boundless enthusiasm, endless musical chops and a great sense of humour, Plants and Animals are leaders in the charge to inject a sense of urbane humanity into the world of indie rock. Sincere live shows, honest production and an obvious joie-de-vivre all contribute to the band’s appeal. It’s as though every person who sees them play is joining a constantly growing family of friends.
As welcoming as it is, Parc Avenue still has moments that many will find challenging. Refusing to kowtow to a market in which the vast majority of successful outfits are strictly anglophone, Plants and Animals wear their bilingualism — and other aspects of their Canadian identity — like a badge of honour. Even the album title is a nod to the Montreal thoroughfare where the record was recorded, which is officially called “avenue de Parc.” At the climax of “À l’Orée des Bois,” a pleasantly personal ballad and the album’s closest thing to a title track, the flawed but cherubic voice of a young boy appears out of the blue to guide the song to its quiet end.
“Nic came up with the idea to have a boys’ choir sing at the end of the song,” says Woodley. “He’s never admitted it, but I think it had something to do with him having had a child during the making of the record. So basically, he hung around outside elementary schools in a van with tinted windows for weeks on end, and finally he found someone.”
