La La Land, the second album from Montreal-based trio Plants and Animals, should be excellent. Their woefully overlooked 2008 debut full-length, Parc Avenue, was ripe to be expanded upon. Full of spacious, mostly acoustic almost-folk sounds, it spackled rich, otherworldly harmonies and honeyed, finger-picked guitar lines over rambling epics. On Parc Avenue, P&A drew a direct line between the bearded Laurel Canyon folk-rockers of the 1970s and the modern psychedelia of bands like Animal Collective. But La La Land, unfortunately, is more concerned with plugging in and cranking up the volume than it is with the subtleties that colored its predecessor.
As its title suggest, La La Land sounds very much like the glitzy, tough L.A. It's not just song titles like "Tom Cruz", "American Idol", and "Kon Tiki" (named for a tacky L.A. hotel) that recall the entertainment capital, but also the album's fuzzed-out Sunset Strip guitar tones, kinetic, urban rhythms, and glossy production makeover. Yet while there is laudable roughness and robustness to these harder charging tracks, no amount of energy or amplification can obscure a song's bloat or lack of memorable hooks. Plants and Animals' strong suit was never the sing-along chorus or the earworm melody, but this new album's aggressiveness-- which plays in stark contrast to the casual, country-stoner pace of its precursor-- combined with the punch of its guitar sound, makes you long for tight pop hooks that never come.
However, amid the album's overstuffed and more conventionally paced tracks, some beautifully strange gems can be unearthed. Unsurprisingly, the album's best moments most closely resemble the meandering songs of Parc Avenue. Songs like "Game Show" and "Undone Melody", which hinge on gritty acoustic foundations and climax with uplifting harmonies, represent the band's most logical progressions from Parc Avenue. The best use of their new plugged-in sound is "American Idol", which, with the rhythmic patter of its vocals and the percussive groove of its riffs, sounds more like Talking Heads than Plants and Animals. So while La La Land may not be the stellar follow-up that Parc Avenue deserved, it does offer something for fans willing to look beyond its tarted-up exterior.
