Parc Avenue

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

Conventional wisdom holds that jam bands write ten-minute songs with yawning solos in place of enormous choruses and the blank goodwill of a Have a Nice Day button. Plants & Animals are most certainly a jam band — the limber structures of their songs betray a fondness for improvisation — but they also understand the importance of economy. The songs on their first full-length dally only as long as they need to, a few of them stumbling into big finales, most of them just ducking out as humbly as they ducked in.

Like the Band — an ensemble they frequently evoke — Plants & Animals are Canadian. Their songwriting is terrifically incidental, the result of long hours taking slow tours of the same chord progressions, filling in the spaces with stray licks and conversational melodies. With the exception of triumphant opener "Bye Bye Bye" — the one time P&A choose the exclamation point over the ellipses — Parc Avenue proceeds at a hobo's amble. The guitars spill out like a babbling brook, a series of rippling notes that glide over stone-smooth percussion. The players follow each other's lead. A little organ waggle begets a curlicue of acoustic guitar, that acoustic guitar tips off a grizzled electric.

Lead singer Warren Spicer's timbre is reedy and weedy, falling into the tiny crevice that separates Bob Dylan from Mark Knopfler. He wheezes out his lyrics, changing volume more than he changes pitch. He leans hard into arbitrary words, turning his verse into a series of freewheeling tone poems. "I saw a woman and a maaaaan/ become a huzz-band and a wiiiiiiife," goes "Mercy," but you get the sense that those itals could have ended up anywhere. It all depends on how the mood strikes him.

Their chief lyrical concerns are mostly pragmatic. In "A L'oree De Bois" they worry the din from rowdy soccer fans in the street will screw up their album, but it sounds like it's gonna be alright, man; just close the window and keep on chooglin'. They even manage a bit of slacker profundity; Spicer at one point sighs, "It takes an enemy to help you get out of bed." The sentiment is profound, but a little hard to buy. After all, who could hate such good-natured loafers?