Parc Avenue (10th Anniversary Edition)

Picture this : Montreal, 2008. (To help you out a little bit, this is the year Obama won the election, the Juno movie and Fleet Foxes were everywhere, No Country For Old Men won Best Picture at the Oscars and Amy Winehouse won a bunch of Grammys). The Mile-End neighbourhood is now the place to be. Pitchfork and SPIN journalists have come and gone and this cultural hub is now considered the new Seattle. Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, The Stills, Malajube and many more are getting well deserved international attention that will forever change the direction of their careers and the careers of other local acts as well.

Enters Plants and Animals with their first full-length, Parc Avenue, following up a 2007 four-track With/Avec EP release. Parc Avenue : an album name giving a nod to the iconic Montreal street carving the district, an album cover shot on our most notable city park, the Mount-Royal, and 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 (Pitchfork). Recorded entirely to analogue tape, and taking conceptual substance as much from the actual experience of recording as from day to day life in the Mile End, Parc Avenue is ultimately best approached as a love letter to the neighbourhood, friends and lovers that inspired it.

Since this release had such an impact ten years ago and garnered die hard fans worldwide, Plants and Animals are happy to announce a 10th anniversary edition including 8 never heard before outtakes.

Woody tells us a bit more about these new gems :

“These are jams from the two or three years leading up to Parc Avenue—from the open plains between our early days as an experimental, instrumental band to our eventual discovery of basic tools like verses and choruses and ending songs all together at the same time. They’re fruits that got stuck on the vine. They’re old T-shirts that got worn all summer but had too many holes to make grade come school in the fall. They’re breadcrumbs on the way to the gingerbread house. They’re Sagrada Familìas in all their unfinished glory. Inside scoop: one of them is “Bye Bye Bye” backwards with forward singing overdubbed. Flip it over and see. (That one almost made the cut because it felt like an Olympic victory in slow motion.) One of them is a cathartic, drunken mess. One of them sounds like a loungy St-Germain song you’d hear coming out of a cafe in 2004. Who did that? We love it. To fans of Parc Ave, We hope you find a special place for these in your hearts too.“