FOR TRIO, NO WORRIES ARE GONNA FIND THEM
Plants and Animals free themselves on new album Waltzed in From the Rumbling, which incorporates recordings of a variety of non-musical items, Jamie O’Meara writes,
Three years ago, Warren Spicer was among a number of musicians invited to speak on CBC Radio as part of a fundraiser for mental health organizations in Montreal.
“I had dealt with — I still do — obsessive-compulsive disorder stuff,” says the Plants and Animals lead vocalist and guitarist. “So I went down to the CBC and did an interview about living with a mental disorder, and it turned out to be a really good experience. It was frightening to do the interview, to go on air and talk about my experiences, but then coming out of it I felt good and felt that I had taken a step in the right direction.
“I think the band and I were in the studio the next day, and I just sang the words ‘no worries gonna find us,’ and it was a kind of affirmation — I had the confidence to sing that and mean it.”
Those words would become the chorus to the single No Worries Gonna Find Us off the band’s recently released album Waltzed in From the Rumbling. And Spicer does indeed sing it like he means it. Set against a string section, reverbladen guitar and a shuffle beat is the reassuring chorus: “No worries, no worries, no worries gonna find us / no worries gonna be the boss of my mind.” The song is cerebral, selfassured and unassumingly sexy in the way Plants and Animals always seem to be. It’s a track that captures the tone of the album, but it didn’t start out that way.
Initially, “it sounded like a Gary Glitter tune,” says drummer/vocalist Matthew Woodley.
“And we wanted to get away from the Gary Glitter vibe,” continues Spicer, “so we took it into a more South African kind of …”
“We went back to our roots is what he’s trying to say,” jokes Woodley.
Waltzed in From the Rumbling finds the indie-rock trio (rounded out by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Nic Basque) in a good place. The three of them as a unit have clocked more than 15 years. In that time, as Plants and Animals, they’ve produced three critically hailed records and now Waltzed in From the Rumbling.
The trio have always been mindful that to keep things interesting for the listener, they’ve needed to keep things interesting for themselves. This time was no different.
Basque, for example, embarked on a self-taught “language” course.
“I used to do a lot more avantgarde, contemporary music,” says Basque, “and before we left for tour I grabbed a book I had on (Olivier) Messiaen’s musical language, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just read that while we’re on tour,’ something from when I studied music. This language is crazy advanced, but it was inspiring to see the limitlessness of it, especially from a guy that worked his whole life to create his own musical language. I thought that maybe there’s a way that we could do that with our own songs.”
“Which is exactly what we did,” says Woodley, tongue in cheek.
“Yeah, the book is coming out,” laughs Spicer.
“But it was a way we could challenge ourselves, maybe borrow some ideas,” says Basque. “And if no one says it’s insane, then maybe it works.”
Waltzed in From the Rumbling opens with the quasi-orchestral pop song We Were One, a track with twisty-turny transitions and different instrumentation. It provided the band with a creative carte blanche.
“It just felt like a big overture, where you have all the themes of the music that will play out throughout the album appear in the overture,” says Spicer. “It doesn’t, by design, exactly do that, but it has that effect.”
“It also allowed us to do anything we wanted after that,” says Basque, chuckling. “It’s like once you’ve heard that, anything can happen!”
And it would seem that almost anything did. Some unusual stuff — from VCRs to refrigerators to ceiling-high rain sticks — was used in recording the album.
“There’s also a field recording of a group of teenage girls on a bus … that sneaks into the song Pure Heart,” says Spicer. “There was this gaggle of girls all laughing and talking about drinking or something, and just the sound of it was cool, so I — incognito — put my phone on record.”