La La Land

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. 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.