The Bowery Ballroom upcoming shows
Plants And Animals
Lost In The Trees
- Venue:
-
The Bowery Ballroom
- Date:
- Wed 6/09
- Notes:
- 18+
- Doors: 8:00 PM / Show: 9:00 PM
- $15
- Plants And Animals
- official website
- myspace
- It’s not easy to label the kind of music Plants and Animals make, but it’s easy for it to feel instantly familiar. Maybe that’s because they record to tape, and their records sound like they could have been made in 1972. But for all their analog warmth, it’s also impossible to deny how raw and recent the songs sound, and harder still to find anything else that sounds quite the same.
Anyone who took their debut, Parc Avenue, into their home and hearts probably already knows this. Since that album was released in early 2008 the band has played over 100 shows, circling the Western world more than once, including appearances at the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago, Primavera in Barcelona, Central Park Summer Stage with the National, and even one night in Columbus opening for Gnarls Barkley, after Danger Mouse discovered Parc Avenue and invited them out. But regardless of where it happened, anyone who has seen the three of them perform live knows that their big sound isn’t some kind of studio wizardry.
Plants and Animals are Warren C. Spicer, Matthew ‘the Woodman’ Woodley, and Nicolas Basque, the product of a musical three-way between two boyhood friends from Canada’s East Coast, and a French-Canadian. As their name suggests, the band has been a creature of evolution from the start. Its first incarnation was entirely instrumental, with loose song structures that built sound around themes and came out like epic folk music. By the time Parc Avenue was complete, Warren was singing and some of the songs were even under four minutes.
The only thing that has really remained constant from the beginning is the attention paid to detail in the recording process—whether it be editing tape with razor blades, or spending a whole day micing the drums.
Plants and Animals latest offering, La La Land, is louder, and tougher, but also showcases them their smoothest and most cohesive to-date. Inspired by a rediscovery of electric guitars, amplification and fuzz pedals, it takes us up and away from Parc Avenue’s Montreal-in-the-summer vibe, and out into the rock n’ roll ether. The album was recorded at the band’s home-base studio in Montreal, The Treatment Room, and at Studio La Frette outside Paris, a brokedown old mansion filled with vintage gear and a killer board in the cellar instead of wine.
Though plenty of wine went into the album. As Warren puts it, “the Paris stuff is like a nice Bordeaux and the Montreal stuff is more like a baked potato. Sessions in Paris ended by 10pm, sessions in Montreal by 6am.” Rum and cokes inspired the initial Treatment Room sessions in late 2008. The album’s first track, “Tom Cruz,” eventually came out of these late nights. As the Woodman tells it, “it was December, pre-Christmas, so we fuelled the session with rum and cokes. They made us feel like Tom Cruise. It gave us killer smiles and made our enemies wither.”
Ultimately it’s this sense of hilarious confidence that currently characterizes Plants and Animals, and also gives La La Land its cohesion. The Woodman’s drums sound bigger and groovier, Nic colours the album with extra guitars and keyboards like a mad painter, and Warren’s vocals have taken even more ambitious strides.
In many ways La La Land is just as eclectic as Parc Avenue, from California coast vibes to Montreal winters and Spanish trains. But there’s something more mature holding it all together now. As they might say in the movies, La La Land isn’t a place—it’s a state of mind. Plants and Animals have never been a band with much interest in posturing or unnecessary theatrics, but on La La Land the curtain isn’t just pulled back, it’s gone entirely.
- Lost In The Trees
- official website
- myspace
- “For me, classical composition is a very humble thing,” says Ari Picker, founder of Lost in the Trees, a musical collective from Chapel Hill, North Carolina recently signed to ANTI Records. “I'm no expert, by any means, but I am blown away by orchestral music. Ideas that are stale or old hat to classical people are still pretty magical to me. All I want is to take a pinch of that brilliance, and put it into what I do.”
Picker, a composer by training and a songwriter by inclination, describes his band as "Orchestral Folk Music" because it features arrangements which harness both the dramatic power of classical music and the more intimate sounds of the singer-songwriter tradition – strings and brass meshing effortlessly with accordion, bells, musical saw, banjo, and mandolin. The group’s Anti- debut, All Alone In An Empty House was co-produced by Scott Solter (St. Vincent, Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, Erik Friedlander) who creates a space in which both varieties of music co-exist with stirring results. The dramatic and symphonic elements of classical music merge with the accessibility of American folk and pop to create a sound both grandiose and intensely personal.
The album is equally striking for the consistency of its lyrical content. Picker’s songs are about how family life intertwines with a creative life – and how such generative states of being are rife with emotions that are amorphous, inspiring and painful all at once. Spaces, places, and people are left barren and devoid of life—fires consume, babies die young. But the flipside of this creative destruction reveals itself when Picker’s characters and settings are left ripe with potential—a painter takes a walk in the woods, empty rooms wait to be filled. The album becomes all the more powerful when you discover its subject matter is literal in unexpected ways.
“The lyrics to the title track ‘All Alone in an Empty House’ are taken from powerful arguments my parents had while living in the house where I was born,” says Picker. “The song’s locations and happenings, my father’s stone wall, the tower off the side of the house that he eventually moved into, my twin sisters who died at birth, my mother's extreme depression, the emotional and sexual abuses, they are all real. But my intention in sharing them is to turn this hard reality into art, something that the listener may find comfort or hope in.”
Picker returns again and again to these memories, transmuting them into images that serve as both facts and symbols–blurring the line between plain confession and furtive metaphor, coming of age story and spirit quest. In this way, the album recalls the mysterious power of indie rock touchstones (Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Arcade Fire’s Funeral) and older records from the Golden Age of the singer-songwriter (Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue).
"Music has played several roles in my life," Picker says. "The songwriting side has humanistic elements. It's a defense mechanism against extreme relationships such as my parents had. Singing is a way of giving something up and letting go. The classical component of my music has more spiritual connotations. I feel like I’m soaking something up, like I’m being spoken to by something very elemental."
“I’m not sure what happens next,” he continues, discussing the future of his music. “I'd like to move on from writing about such personal matters, and perhaps pay more attention to others. Recently, though, its felt like there's been some kind of convulsion to this story. Maybe that’s the end, or maybe that’s the sign it deserves a sequel.”
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