Plants & Animals - Parc Avenue

The term “Montreal indie band” has become a bit old. For a while it seemed all one had to do to find success in the Canadian indie scene was to move to Montreal, buy an array of thrift store instruments and record a lo-fi album in someone’s basement studio. Being able to wear the label of Montreal indie band comes with perks. More hipsters will listen to an indie band just because they are from Montreal, ignoring, of course, the fact that their music probably sounds just the same as fifty other Montreal bands. Media outlets, such as Pitchfork, will also drool over and mindlessly promote any band from Montreal.

This is why I am hesitant to introduce Plants and Animals as a Montreal indie band. Yes, they are from Montreal; yes, they are an independent music act, but they possess a greater musical complexity and maturity that sets them apart from many of their contemporaries.

Plants and Animals are fairly new to the music world releasing only two EPs before this year’s full length debut Parc Avenue, which apparently took just under three years to put together. The effort put into the unusually long recording process of this album is evident within the first minute with the effervescently loud opener “Bye Bye Bye”.

Much of Parc Avenue is made up of allusions to nature and an interesting mix of modern indie rock and psychedelic folk rock. At many points throughout this album, Plants and Animals sound more like a group from San Francisco forty years ago than a current indie band from today’s music scene. This is why the “Montreal indie band” label fails with Plants and Animals. However, it would also be inaccurate to group them into the “stoner hippie rock” category.

How about “psychedelic-indie-nature-folk-rock”? Maybe it’s the name Plants and Animals, or the front cover picnic party, or the stories of rivers, fields, mating songs, birds, trees and rainbows, but after experiencing Parc Avenue the listener can not escape the overwhelming imagery that paints a vast picture of flora and fauna.

Why not just forget about genre-labeling for this one? You’ll just get frustrated.

What stands out about Plants and Animals is their confidence in their ability to craft a record that is noticeably different than the standard indie band sound. This isn’t some pretentious, half-assed, lo-fi record that any high school kid could lazily put together. From start to finish, Parc Avenue is a consistently superb debut and not exactly what you would expect from a band whose career is relatively young. After listening to Parc Avenue, it is quite apparent that Plants and Animals possess more than enough potential to have a very prolific musical journey ahead of them.