Plants and Animals

La La Land

The suits and ties have managed to drag off another one of my favourite bands. Plants and Animals are an indie-rock band from Montréal. Their last album, Parc Avenue, garnered significant critical praise and pretty much rocked the socks off everyone I know. I went to see them play at the Biltmore last year and was giddy with excitement. Then they began to play their new songs. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it became a horrible, dirty thing when it turned out that all of their new songs were boring.

Fast-forward to today, and their new album, La La Land. I had really hoped that in the time between that show and this album, they would have realized just how uninteresting these songs were and resumed their course of awesomeness. Alas, my initial impression proved true.

“Future from the 80s” and “Celebration” are both that dry sort of simple and slow that makes them good sleepy-time music but toherwise useless. The true-blue rock tracks like “Kon Tiki” or “The Mama Papa” don’t have the build and crescendo of previous  hits. The vocals on all the tracks seem a lot more muted than in the previous album, which is too bad because I genuinely do like to hear Plants and Animals’ lyrics.

Perhaps I’m being a bit unfair. The last minute of “Game Shows” has an interesting piano part that I liked quite a bit, it’s just a shame that you have to get through the first four minutes. Similarly “American Idol” and “Tom Cruz” aren’t terrible songs even if they do have incredibly stupid names. Overall, it seems like someone convinced Plants and Animals that they needed to be a bit more “polished” or “put-together”  or other buzz words that the masses seem to like. For me, the best part of the album is that I get to make the joke that they certainly must have been in La La Land when they came up with it.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...