ORGANIC GROWTH Plants and Animals
May 20, 2010
Indie rock? Jam band? Nobody's ready to vote this Juno-nominated Canadian outfit off the island yet.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
Plants and Animals, out of Montreal, have been on the road almost continuously since their first full length Parc Avenue got the "next big thing" tag in 2008. A glowing Pitchfork review, shortlisting for the Polaris Music Prize, and a Juno nomination: all might have convinced a less hard-working band to sit back and bask in the glory. But not Plants and Animals, a threesome that has used the two-year interval to hone a harder-edged, more rocking and distinctly more "live" sound for a second album La La Land (Secret City; read review here) - and to connect with audiences.
"If you get a big review early on, you still have to represent," says Warren Spicer, the band's singer and guitarist. "You still have to go out and play shows for people. Because if you're a shitty band and you get a great review, you'll probably get a bunch of attention for a while. But the only way to gauge what's going on is really by performing, being with an audience."
Plants and Animals began, modestly, in Halifax, when two of its three members met in seventh grade. Spicer, already playing guitar, was deep into Hendrix and classic rock. Matthew "Woody" Woodley was taking fencing lessons with Spicer's brother. They started playing together as pre-teenagers, mostly rock at first, until they met a saxophone player named Danny Orr, who got them into jazz. Spicer remembers busking in downtown Halifax, and for the three of them, "It actually was really profitable."
Spicer and Woodley headed to Montreal for university, enrolling at Concordia University for electro-acoustic music composition. There they met Nicolas Basque, who now plays guitar, bass and keyboards in the band. The trio had begun to develop an interest in Chicago's post-rock sound, bands like Tortoise and musicians like Jim O'Rourke. "We were trading CDs and stuff and then we ended up collaborating on a bunch of compositions," says Spicer.
At the time their academic focus was on abstract experiments Spicer describes as "music without instruments and no meter and no time, just sound." Yet as he finished his studies, he found himself hankering for the kind of song-based compositions that he could share with friends. "Nobody enjoyed it," he says, of his electro-acoustic output. "I couldn't play it for anyone. It became clear that it wasn't something that I wanted to pursue. It would have been too lonely."
So, he returned to the classic rock of his early teens. "I went full circle," he says. "I started out when I was a kid playing Bob Dylan songs on my guitar. Then I went to university and got heavy into weird, experimental, academic head music. I got my fill of that and slowly started getting back to songs."
Post-university, Spicer successfully applied for a Canada Council grant with a series of demos. With the grant money, he got Woodley and Basque to help him flesh out his ideas. The first self-titled Plants and Animals album came out of these sessions. It was all instrumentals, no vocals at first, but Spicer says that the singing came about organically. "We were just living and playing music with lots of different people and we started singing," he remembers. "I guess it might have been something I'd always wanted to do but was afraid."
As they coalesced into a band, the three members of Plants and Animals began working on their second album Parc Avenue. Fitting sessions in between day jobs, paying for studio time themselves, it took several years to complete. "It's all over the place," says Spicer. "There's stuff on that record that was recorded two years or three years before the record came out."
Parc Avenue was a surprise success, winning the band positive attention in Canada and beyond. They were nominated for a Juno Prize, Canada's Grammy equivalent and shortlisted for the Polaris Prize. Plants and Animals took to the road, and as they played night after night, their sound began to change. "We were playing loud and getting into it equipment wise and really working towards a sound on the road for a couple of years while we toured Parc Avenue," Spicer says. "We'd really gotten away from what we were doing in the studio with Parc Avenue, which was a lot more acoustic guitars and more laid back."
So, when Plants and Animals regrouped to record the followup, they were a subtly different band. "There's a lot more road references," says Spicer. "There's a lot more about this new lifestyle that we've had to adopt. I think a lot of the lyrical material came from looking out a van window - and coming home from being away for a couple of months."
The way they played, too, was shaped by months on the road. Spicer says that one thing he likes about records by Canadian forebears like the Band and Neil Young is that "they tend to be very natural. Not a lot of hiding behind studio equipment. That definitely was part of how we made records. We certainly keep it, like, kind of real as we can."
The band also makes room for improvisation, both in the songwriting and in live performance. "When we rehearse, we dedicate a certain amount of time - not that we actually consciously do this - but we rehearse the songs but we also will take one of the songs and just play it for like 20 minutes," says Spicer.
Why? Spicer explains that it opens up the songs and keeps them interesting. "You shake up all your expectations of what you can do with a song, and you just kind of pull it apart. After you do that for a while, there's all this new information about how you can perform a song. It might not be evident to the listener, because it's not like you change the format of the song. Still, you learn that there are all these other secret doors in various places. If you just play the tune the same way over and over again, you just get really good at it, but it's not as exciting."
Because of this open-ended tendency - and a shared set of blues, country and classic rock influences - Plants and Animals sometimes gets lumped in with the jam band contingent, a comparison that bemuses Spicer. Spicer says that, at 14, he went to see the Jerry Garcia Band with his father, on a trip to San Francisco, and that the whole experience was "pretty amazing." Still, he doesn't think that the term really applies to his own band. "There are elements of jam in our sound. We could go there if we wanted to go there more," he says. "But one way or the other, we haven't really attached ourselves to it or dismissed ourselves from it. We're not a part of it. But if somebody thinks we're a jam band, it doesn't really matter."
A good deal of the road's raucous energy can be heard in tracks like "Tom Cruz," the album's opener. "We just kind of banged that one out one night. We were really psyched and there was just some kind of musical energy that made us think that we were Tom Cruise. It just made sense."
"Swinging Bells," partly inspired by a video gaming machine, deals with the uncertainties that face a young band - or any emerging artist trying to make a go of things. Spicer claims he was thinking about an actor friend in LA, who was trying to break into the movies when he wrote that song, as well as his own band. And "American Idol," one of the album's highlights, borrows a metaphor from mass culture to voice Plants and Animals' own challenges. "It's not really about American Idol," says Spicer. "It's about approval, really, being approved. And again, it has to do with adopting this new life as a band that releases records and has to wait for people to vote you off the island or not."
Spicer is mixing reality show metaphors a little, but the message is clear: Plants and Animals want to make their case to you, on the road and via La La Land.
Asked if their relative lack of gimmicks might hold them back, Spicer answered, "We'll connect to who we connect to and those people will appreciate us because of what we have to give. That's the important thing."
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