Thursday 03.12.09: PLANTS AND ANIMALS / CASTLEDOOR / AVI BUFFALO @ echo

Plants and Animals || Listen || Watch

Like a distant Canadian cousin of Blitzen Trapper, this three-piece spins shaggy songs into expansive, genre-bending symphonies. And though last year’s too-brief With/Avec EP hinted at Plants and Animals’ expansiveness, it didn’t fully prepare listeners for Parc Avenue, a sprawling collection of rootsy melodies, majestic arrangements, and classic rock riffs that owes as much to jam-band psychedelia and it does to delicately orchestrated chamber-folk.

The album kicks off with “Bye Bye Bye”, which sounds, initially, like a Coldplay ballad led by Neil Young. But, mere seconds into the song, it explodes into a choral epic built on a foundation of jaunty pianos and embellished with plangent autoharp runs and bursts of stately brass. Tellingly, the track’s infectious climax is more satisfying because it comes in fits and starts, its anthemic build interrupted several times by quiet interludes of noodley folk.

That, in short, is Plants And Animals. They offer up explosive, Polyphonic Spree-sized choir choruses, 1970s AM radio guitars, cozy folk balladry, and rambling stoner boogie-often in the course of one song– and switch between them with little warning. Many of their songs clock in at over five minutes long, but that’s all the better for them to pick up steam, stylistically mutate, or expand. – Pitchfork

With:
Castledoor || Listen
Avi Buffalo

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text Parcave to 467467

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8:30pm / $8 advance, $10 day of show / 18+

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January 29th, 2009 filed in 18+, events
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