Hungry and restless and wicked and wild

>> Plants and Animals escape music school, evade pigeonholes and celebrate their street (minus McDonald’s) with Parc Avenue

FURR YOUR PLEASURE: Matthew Woodley,
Nicolas Basque and Warren Spicer

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“Post-classic-rock” or hippie prog? Roots rockers or jazzy improvisers? Radiohead, Queen or the Guess Who?

“There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” says singer-guitarist Warren Spicer, pondering the motley crop of comparisons and categories evoked in efforts to pin Plants and Animals down.

“Some of them make us laugh and some of them make us angry,” he adds, “but it’s really up to the people talking about it to find their words to describe it.”

“We’re a rock band,” offers guitarist Nic Basque.

“Yeah,” says drummer Matthew “Woodman” Woodley ( the Mirror’ s former assistant editor), making the sign of the beast with his right hand. “How do you spell this?”

Evading a pigeonhole is all in a day’s work for Plants and Animals, who’ve been plotting their metamorphosis from Mile-End studio hermits to rocking and rolling road warriors for years, if only half-consciously.

Halifax natives and childhood friends Spicer and Woodley met their Québécois collaborator Basque in the eletroacoustic studies program at Concordia University, and together they began to hatch an escape plan. After shedding a little post-academic skin on their debut release in 2005, on local indie label Ships at Night, the trio settled into the studio, initially emerging only occasionally, to storm the stage at a local venue.

Late last year, the band was signed to another local label, Secret City, allowing them to tour with labelmate Patrick Watson, play outside Canada for the first time (in Iceland) and support Wolf Parade on a series of dates. And late last summer, just prior to offering the public a taste of Plants and Animals to come (their EP with/avec), the trio finally wrapped up their LP, celebrating on Mount Royal with the hippie picnic/satanic ritual depicted on its cover.

A couple of weeks ahead of the record’s local launch, the Mirror went to the site of its creation, Spicer’s apartment, on the street for which it’s named, Parc Avenue. Amid large dogs and small tea pots, we discussed Montreal’s other main street, the home-school of rock and more of the magic ingredients that make up their minor and major rock tunes.

Mirror: Tell me about your album title.

Matthew Woodley: Around the time we finished the record, someone from the label came up with it, Andrew Rose.

Warren Spicer: We were a little worried when he said he had an idea.

Nic Basque: And he told us each separately, so I think we all had the same reaction like, “Uh! You have an idea?” and then, “Oh! I like it.”

MW: It’s the neighbourhood we worked in, at the Treatment Room and then here at Warren’s studio right on Parc. Especially in summertime, when the windows were open, the Greeks were winning soccer games, the street really had a presence as we were working. Also, it’s this weird, quirky street full of characters, it’s dynamic, it’s a mish-mash of lots of stuff that’s in the music.

NB: It’s also a clin d’oeil to Montreal ’cause there are Park Avenues in a lot of major cities but it’s only here that it’s written in the French way.

M: And it’s so different from the usual connotation of Park Avenue, based on the one in New York.

WS: Boutiques and fashion. Yeah, it’s a little more run-down.

Avenue du Crap

WS: There’s something weird about Parc. I’ve lived here for seven years and this street seems to have the highest turnover for stores. There’s a whole bunch of shops that constantly get reopened as something new every two months. I’ve never seen any other street like it. And when you’ve lived here long enough, you just know what’s gonna fly and what’s not gonna fly. To really stretch it, when we were making the record we had a lot of songs and a lot of ideas that were constantly battling for position, so I think we opened a lot of stores on Parc Avenue, theoretically, that shut down.

NB: We shut a lot of them down.

WS: And the ones that made it onto the record are, well, they’re here for now anyway (the band laughs). It’s the grand opening of our 11 new stores.

M: I noticed that the McDonald’s by the mountain is closed.

MW: The neighbourhood was up in arms when that place opened up, there were protests on the street. You don’t see that much.

M: You don’t see many McDonald’s close either.

WS: It’s nice to see something like that shut down. They have a little sign on their window that says, “Dear Customers: We are sorry…”. It’s like a full-on apology sent down from headquarters.

M: By the way, was the name chosen before or after the proposed re-naming of the street?

MW: It was after, but that had nothing to do with it, unless that made it pop more for us, or made it more prominent in Andrew’s head. There’s nothing anti-Robert Bourassa about it.

NB: Yes there is!

Where the art is

M: How long did it take you guys to make this record?

MW: We worked on it for two years, but there were long periods of time when we didn’t do anything and there was one summer when we really worked on it every day.

WS: But it wasn’t like we had a specific outline, that we were just putting in the hours to put all the pieces together, it was more like working fast, sketching and tossing a lot of stuff onto the floor. We were learning how to do it as we did it, and every now and then, through this mess, we’d actually come up with a song. Over the course of a couple of years, we just got better and better at it, and there’d be less shit all over the floor.

M: I suppose a lot of that was passing through a transitional phase, coming out of your electroacoustic and jazz studies.

WS: We were primarily an instrumental band for a while. There were no songs, just ideas that sounded good when we played them. But then we started changing, we started writing more and more stuff that was gonna be part of this epic rock record. It was just like a long coming-of-age in the studio.

MW: We got instructional tapes off the Internet.

WS: (in smarmy announcer voice) How to record a rock record: If you’re gonna write a song, you’re gonna need a chorus, and it’s gonna have to be catchy.

M: What’s the most important aspect of your formal education in relation to this record?

WS: Actually, it’s probably getting out of that environment and getting back to enjoying playing our instruments. There’s a relief that we can just play the way we want to play, it doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to be avant-garde. You get kind of brainwashed by that life—success in that setting is winning prizes, trying to impress people for awards, which is very different from just playing music for the sake of it. Eventually, I was just like, “Fuck that! I wanna play three chords on my guitar and sing a song.”

MW: I don’t want people to like us ’cause they think, “Oh, that’s different,” and then set up all these reference points. I want people to get into the music because they feel something.

NB: Because it touches them.

MW: Music for the people!

With David MacLeod at la Sala Rossa
on Tuesday, Feb. 26, 9 p.m.