…Such chores are new to Plants and Animals, who’ve only graduated from localized hometown acclaim to a burgeoning indie-rock breakout since a fortuitous signing to Montreal label Secret City – home to Polaris Music Prize winner Patrick Watson – last year. Promotion chores are becoming more commonplace as momentum from the band’s recent, well-regarded EP, with/avec, mounts upon approach to the Feb. 26 release of its official debut album, Parc Avenue.
The band has been at this for a while, mind you. Plants and Animals has existed since 2000, growing out of the friendship and formidable instrumental chemistry Spicer and drummer Matthew Woodley – chums since they first met in Halifax at 12 years old – forged with bassist/guitarist Nicolas Basque while studying music at Concordia University.
A lot of Parc Avenue itself actually predates the band’s current flirtation with trendiness. The three laboured over the album for two years, chasing perfection when they “caught a glimpse, off in the distance, of that vague, elusive entity that we were almost in sight of” but didn’t quite know how to reach yet.
“It’s like an aged whisky or something,” laughs Spicer. “It’s been percolating and developing for a long time to get to the point where now it’s just simple and delicious.”
Parc Avenue isn’t simple at all, of course. Deliciously overwrought and glazed with towering hippies-gone-prog-rock ambition, it’s a dense and frequently wondrous display of the players’ talents for arrangement, production and performance. Spicer admits it took them years to shake off their worst indulgences and find a way to confine its gifts in songs that had “a beginning, a middle and an end.”
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