Plants and Animals are a Canadian indie-rock band from Montreal, comprised of guitarist-vocalists Warren Spicer and Nic Basque, and drummer-vocalist Matthew Woodley. They are signed to Secret City Records.
The first seeds of the band were originally planted on Canada’s salty-aired East Coast in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Young Warren C. Spicer and Matthew ‘the Woodman’ Woodley had begun playing together in high-school bands. The sea winds eventually carried them through the vast plains of Quebec to Montreal (a journey they would come to know intimately as the years wore on). It was in the now hallowed halls of Concordia University’s music department that they would come upon Nicolas Basque, a strange francophone native that shared their musical inclinations (and a trappeur’s finely-tuned taste in cuisine). It wasn’t until then that the three boys became men, signified their union with a name, and that Plants and Animals emerged from the wildlife.
In 2003 they bat out an instrumental menagerie of song-like folk-beasts, and put some of them to tape in the form of a recording that local label Ships at Night would later release. By 2005 the three young men were taming the sprawling wilderness of their sound and sculpting real songs, as Spicer also lead the way to a (hitherto unheard of) vocal domination of their material—as if he had been possessed by the ghost of some recently departed soul singer. During this time Spicer and Woodley would occasionally stop by to care for some of the neighbours—Timber, Socalled, and Katie Moore—and play. All the while, the Halifax-born were jamming and pruning with Basque, harnessing the band and its songs like a wild horse. Some called it post-classic-rock. Some called it folk-prog. Those who knew better didn’t say anything at all.
In about the summer of 2005 they carried a 24-track Studer “bull” up the stairs of Spicer’s apartment and split their time between their new makeshift studio there (aka Le Carillon Tropical), and the Treatment Room. By fall 2006 the foundations of what would later become Parc Avenue were layed, the band was playing shows (and singing), and a relationship with Montreal label Secret City Records was formed. By summer 2007 the once-monster was complete, temporarily tamed, housed, and ready to be unleashed.
While the band awaited the release of Parc Avenue, they kept busy touring in the US, Canada, and Iceland, working on their album art and recording with/avec EP that was released in Canada in October 2007. Like all plants and animals, these ones are just gonna keep on growing and blossoming, working on new songs, playing them for people and having a good time doing it.
