Send "Plants and Animals " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Nowtoronto |
 Considering the accolades for Plants and Animals’ last record, 2008’s Parc Avenue, you’d figure the Montreal trio might’ve carried a lot of weight on their shoulders about the follow-up. But La La Land is as laid-back and assured as anything they’ve released to date.The album basks in sun-drenched classic rockisms while managing to sound leagues above throwback jam bands like Phish. Despite their casual air, the 11 songs have a consistency that the tracks on Parc Avenue lacked. Aside from a few touches – a yacht rock saxophone solo in American Idol, a tongue-in-cheek vocoder in Future From The 80s – La La Land rarely strays from punchy, mid-tempo riffs and fuzz-pedal solos. Somehow, it’s all the better for it....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| 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....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Out in the world, plants and animals are things we tend to impinge upon. They’re all out there in the world, moving around in their familiar circles, and we build cities out to meet them, or pave walkways through their forests, or domesticate them into pets or stick them in pots on our front porch. The point is: we move into their territory. But the band Plants and Animals? Well, that’s a whole other story. They force themselves upon you. They spread out and take over, pulling you into their frayed, expansive sound. Their 2008 album, Parc Avenue, traveled the dusty roads of Crazy Horse with all the wide-eyed theatrics of Meatloaf. It soared, dipped into valleys, spread out and took its time—and we loved every minute of it. Their sophomore release, La La Land, does not take the same trajectory. The path through this album is a much more direct one, steeped in head-on rock and roll. The guitars are big and fuzzy here, the rhythms singular and driving. In one way, it eschews the oddball antics of its predecessor—which helped its soCal ‘70s feel gain a touch of the new—but also it manages, in its finest moments, a subtler expanse that works well....full text |
Plants and Animals lyrics
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