Plants and Animals singer/guitarist Warren Spicer has recorded and mixed his band's fourth full-length to near perfection. This cannot be overstated. Each instrument on Waltzed in from the Rumbling is so exactly in tune and at the optimum volume and placement in the speakers that it feels like each note is tangible. From the chop of the stereo-panned acoustic guitars to the gentle golf claps on last month's single, "No Worries Gonna Find Us," to the train-brakes flute on "So Many Nights," to the string and horn arrangements that bring so much texture to this album, everything is in its right place. If that sounds like I'm referencing a different band, this is because Plants and Animals sound like a different band, namely a combination of turn-of-the-century Radiohead and turn-of-the-century Flaming Lips.
It's another detour in a career made of them. Over the years, Plants and Animals' disinclination to stick with a signature sound has pretty much become their signature. Their first album favored folk rock arrangements and invited comparisons to Blitzen Trapper and Neil Young. Their second offered pared-down rock that ignored the precedent set by their debut. The third album was the proverbial “mature” outing. So now, after a four-year absence, Plants and Animals have made a collection of songs that sound gorgeous and will pop up on your Radiohead Pandora station, even though they likely wouldn't even pop up on your Plants and Animals Pandora station.
If the music falls between a soundtrack to dystopia and a technicolor symphony, Spicer's words also fall somewhere between Thom Yorke's sneering cynicism and Wayne Coyne's wide-eyed wonder. Both lyrical ends of the OK Bulletin spectrum—"love is the place that you're drawn to" on one end and "when I am king, you will be first against the wall" on the other—are highly effective, but the area Spicer chooses to inhabit is often a no man's land. The first words he sings on the album are "all my time, my friend, I'll spend with you," which doesn't sound nearly epic enough for the music he's created with guitarist/bassist Nicolas Basque and drummer Woody Matthew Woodley.
The most rewarding surprises of the album occur when the influences aren't as apparent. The trio brought many guests into Montreal's Mixart Studios for the recording sessions, most notably vocalists Adéle Trottier-Rivard and Katie Moore, who add winning romanticism to the mix. They trade call-and-response vocals on lead single "Stay" and sing with Spicer on "Off the Water" that they won't always have the chance to "move with you like water when we dance." Although all of this is expertly orchestrated, it retains a loose feel, one brimming with the excitement of friends getting back together to collaborate on music again. In doing so, Plants and Animals have created something beautiful, even if it's not wholly original.
