Plants and Animals - Parc Avenue

The band wrote this album in a studio loft in Montreal. The street? You guessed it, Parc Avenue. It quickly earned attention from the Canadian music scene and was soon nominated for a Polaris Prize among some of my favourite bands of all time, including Caribou and Basia Bulat. They didn't win.

But! -- the album is astounding. There's definitely that Montreal sound in there, similar to Arcade Fire in instrumentation across the board, with various strings, piano, and a touch of spicy indie vocalizations from Warren Spicer (see what I did there... spicey?). Arcade's Sarah Neufeld offered string compositions for the album and it shows.

Spicer's songs are manifested around the earnesty of any good young man. "Bye bye bye," he sings during the album's catchiest song, which was also a free iTunes download that you missed at the end of August. "It's very easy to do. We never needed to."

Another standout is "Feedback in the Field." The seemingly endless affected guitar solo for the second half evokes grunge-funk spaceout solos of the 70s. I can practically see Johnny Depp in some drug movie overdosing while Sienna Miller stares out of a window balcony. What do you see?