Flowers & organs & plants & animals

• Plants and Animals, “Guru/Sinnerman” (buy digitally here)

This has jam-band trappings, I suppose, but it just sounds like great jazz to me. The repeating vamp/pulse of the bassline holds things steady while guitars & bongos orbit in crazy looping flares. And then, holy bonus, it morphs into “Sinnerman”! No one can do it like Nina Simone, but still, I’m usually inclined to be charitable with other versions – God bless ’em for trying and all that. This one holds up nicely; I like the distended phrasing on the vocals. (The whole thing also reminds me very much of Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun,” another song I dearly love.)

Plants and Animals are apparently from Montreal, and this is from a four-song EP called with/avec that’s definitely worth seeking out. One song, “Who’s Lola?” comes off like a veritable mini-suite a la The Who 1967. Another one, “Faerie Dance,” is beguilingly pretty, and I have to give them props for having the stones to call a song “Faerie Dance” without, well, being Marc Bolan.

What with/avec also really reminds me of is this:

• Six Organs of Admittance, “School of the Flower” (buy here)

See what I mean? The arpeggiated little guitar riff maintains coherence the same way the bassline does in “Guru/Sinnerman,” allowing everything else to twist & howl at will and setting up great furnace-roar electric guitar work.

School of the Flower was probably my fave album of whatever that year was – 2005, I guess. Alas, I find the two Six Organs records since, including the brand-new one, pleasant enough but not that interesting or inviting. To my ears Flower had a sonic variety and a loose, associative quality that they haven’t recaptured; the stuff since then seems dry and schematic in comparison. In fact, it’s with/avec that sounds like the Six Organs album I’ve been waiting on for a couple years.