After the recent launch of their fourth, full-length album, Vancouver indie band Mother Mother is back, kicking off a nation-wide tour on November 7. While the band has been on and off the road this year, opening for Our Lady Peace, appearing at summer festivals, and headlining shows of their own, the upcoming tour will mark the first time they draw material from their latest album, The Sticks.

“Releasing a record is like letting free a caged bird,” says lead singer Ryan Guildemond. “It flies away, quickly out of eye shot, and you start to forget all about it. Going on tour is our turn to be a bird in a cage, doing tricks. The only thing that matters in a day is getting better at our tricks.”

While every band needs to practice their tricks, Mother Mother is no stranger to the business of touring. While continuing to deliver quality tracks, they’ve consistently toured every year since the release of their first album, Touch Up, in 2007. They’ve even garnered enough attention to tour internationally several times—a milestone for every indie band.

“It’s the difference between getting invited to a sort-of-friend’s party where you don’t really know anyone, and throwing your own party where you know everyone,” says Guildemond, when asked about how recent shows compare the recent shows to their early gigs. “The former, you have to execute your gestures with grace and precision to win ‘em over. The latter, you have more leeway to blunder. That said, no one really likes a sloppy host, so we tell ourselves that every additional impression is a first impression.”

In between dominating the nation’s indie-music industry, touring, and experimenting with reverb chamber closets in the studio, it’s hard to imagine that Mother Mother actually has time to sit down and write music.

When asked where the inspiration comes from, Guildemond responds, “Music is a very fun medium of creative expression that offers a wonderful escape from the mundanity of the everyday. Once you experience that, you realize that staying prolific is to the soul’s benefit, so you best not be lazy.”

Mother Mother’s music falls somewhere along the spectrum of “a random clash of pop and rock that just happened to sound amazing,” and plain noise. They have standouts that stick in listeners’ ears long after the first listen, as well as tracks which border on the quickly-forgettable;  both darker songs that experiment with multi-dimensionality, and those for easy-listening.

“How we come off to others  [in terms of] challenging versus easy music is likely to show inconsistencies, and which of the two I prefer, I don’t really know. I just want to do what appeals to me and the band, because you can’t please them all,” says Guildemond. “The indie-diehards will say we’re banal while the mainstreamers will say too weird, and therein lies the meaningless subjective beauty of art.”

Still, their repertoire is broad enough—it’s a little bit of what mainstreamers love, and just enough of what indie kids don’t.

Mother Mother play on November 21 at the Corona Theatre (2490 Notre-Dame West). Tickets are $26.90

When I finally reach Dan Deacon after a frustrating number of dropped calls, he apologizes for the poor reception, and tells me, in high spirits, that he’s “somewhere rural.”

Deacon is currently traversing North America in support of his third album, and Domino Records debut, America. As the title suggests, the album deals with land and landscape—in particular, with travel, including jaunts to the frontiers of mobile reception.

America is inspired by the sweeping scope and immense diversity of the country Deacon calls home. Its very name possesses, according to the album’s press release, “an infinite range of connotations, both positive and negative.”

Deacon, moreover, appreciates the novel aspects that touring across the country brings to his music.

“Travelling with new people, and some people who haven’t travelled before, brings a newness and a freshness to it,” says Deacon; the experience has only reinforced his ideas about the diversity of the land.

This freshness, and its consequent broadening of horizons, seems to be a recurring theme for both the man and the album. Indeed, a good deal of media attention has focused on the changes evident in America, a record which moves away from the energy-charged pop intensity of Deacon’s hit debut Spiderman of the Rings. The changes, however, are less drastic than critics may suggest.

Sophomore record Bromst (2009), while lacking the amount of song-suite-epicness in this latest offering, marks an indubitable transition from the pop ecstasy of former days. Deacon began work on America as soon as Bromst was finished, and shows have featured material from America for quite some time.

The live performances, however, won’t differ too much from what fans have come to expect.

“There’s largely the same energy to the show,” says Deacon. “It’ll be pretty sweaty… people dance quite a bit.”

The break between Deacon’s last two releases can, in large part, be attributed to the fact that he’s been rather busy. His diversions have included scoring Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt, and several classical music projects, including two compositions which were performed at Carnegie Hall earlier this year.

“They changed the way I think about sounds, instruments, music … they definitely had a big influence,” Deacon says of his side projects. He has a real interest in working with different media, wanting “to try as many different forms as possible … they all have their own forms, settings, contexts.”

When it comes to working with someone else’s vision, such as during the Coppola project, Deacon is amazingly positive—perhaps surprisingly so, for a man who custom-built a recording space for one of America’s tracks to ensure full creative control.

“It’s always nice to work within limits,” he says. “It gives you something to push the boundaries of.”

This penchant for experimentation is not limited to Deacon’s lesser known projects. Audiences on his present tour will be treated to some Deacon-style performance innovation, such as his concert mobile app.

“If you think about [smartphones as] lights and speakers …you can synchronize and utilize those in a way that adds to the performance,” says Deacon.

Having just last week been implored by Dan Mangan to “all put away our phones and just be here,” I can’t help but comment to Deacon that his embrace of smartphones runs counter to the impatience and frustration many other artists express.

His response is that the app “changes the way that people think about the phone. That’s what I like about it. It’s no longer about the individual phone … Our app is deliberately not interesting if you use it by yourself. You can’t really use it by yourself, you have to use it at a show … it needs a critical mass of people to make it work, to make it exciting.”

This latest experiment certainly should be; it’s the latest in a long line of crowd-participation techniques from a man who’s long been known for the unified energy and synchronized dancing of his live shows—Deacon even performed earlier this year to energize crowds at the Occupy protests. This current tour is just the beginning—he is “still figuring out how it all works” this time around, but already looking ahead to writing music specifically to be used with the app in the future.

But where does this interest in getting folks involved come from? “Ah… I don’t know… I think it’s just a weird neurosis that I have,” Deacon replies.

Whatever the source of his talent, working up a crowd is something which the man has mastered. Deacon’s tour hits Montreal on November 10, and a fantastic time is all but guaranteed.

For those who don’t have a smartphone, fret not.

“It sounds cheesy,” Deacon admits, “but the light literally shines on us all… we don’t all need to have the phone.”

Of the show itself, Deacon says, “it’s better to go with an open mind and with no expectations, people might have a better time that way.”

Dan Deacon plays on November 10 at the SAT (1201 Boulevard Saint-Laurent.) Tickets are $17 advance, $20 at the door.

Montreal’s own Plants and Animals are no strangers to the music scene. The talented trio, consisting of Warren Spicer, Matthew “Woodman” Woodley, and Nicolas Basque, met at Concordia University and took what seemed like the natural step forward to form an indie-rock compilation.

In the beginning, the trio was heavily reliant on improvisation, taking small stages around Montreal. Spicer (vocals) was quite shy at first, and it was only when he allowed his silence to grow into his signature melodic vocals that the band really took off.

“We’ve become something like a chicken sandwich. Warren is the meat, Woody is the bread that holds us all together and I like to think I’m the sauce that tends to get all over the place,” says Basque.

The majority of their inspiration stems from music in the ‘60s, as well as modern theatre and dance.

“It’s really tough to pinpoint what inspires you musically as a band,” says Basque. “We all have many creative friends, such as Katie Moore and Michael Bryan, that radiate wild, loose, and experimental waves. We find that kind of exposure very healthy.”

Since their formation in 2002, Plants and Animals released a self-titled debut album, in 2003, followed by an EP and three full-length albums. Basque explains that the band’s three newest albums are meant to resemble the transitions between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

“Parc Avenue (2008) definitely has a naïve aspect to it, along with it being precious and welcoming. La La Land (2010) is much darker and psychedelic, and reflects the experimental stage in someone’s teenage years. We then finally arrive at The End of That (2012), which radiates a certain sense of nakedness, maturity, and simplicity.”

Though each album’s sound was developed quite differently, each one is recorded close to home.

“We love to record and rehearse at the Treatment Room here in Montreal. All of our gear is there, we know the place like the back of our hand, and we know the people so well. It’s home to us,” explains Basque.

When asked to describe Plants and Animals’ signature sound in a few words, Basque calls it a “vibrant and real with an organic quality.” It is something that “moves a lot, and moves together simultaneously as the chemistry is sonically dynamic.” Compression and saturation in order to please radio standards is something they shy away from, and instead strive for the notions of experiment and surprise.

The End of That sparked an undeniable buzz in Montreal, as well as other provinces, eventually catching on across borders. Previously touring with Wolf Parade, Gnarles Barkley, and Grizzly Bear, Plants and Animals have shown a ready appeal to national audiences.

Following the end of their tour, which winds down in mere weeks, the trio plan to buckle down and get back to rehearsing.

“The direction in which our sound is now going is really exciting for us. We want to try to do something with more texture and depth that is challenging both for us and our listeners,” says Basque.

No matter where this new direction takes them, their sound is nothing short of accessible. What will remain constant are the recurring emotional curves that emerge when listeners least expect them.

“Our ideal fan is someone who can party to one of our groovier songs, and mellow out during a slower one,” Basque says. “Whoever can keep up with the highs and lows of our pieces is welcome at any show of ours.”

Plants and Animals are playing Nov. 16 at The Corona Theatre (2490 Rue Notre-Dame West.) Tickets are $20.

The premise is intriguing enough: Jacqueline, a female combat officer who served in Afghanistan, wakes up in a dark hospital cell complaining of a phantom pain in her amputated leg. What follows, however, is more phantasmagoric—the brilliant Zach Fraser enters the stage as Jacqueline’s French-Canadian great-grandfather, who was unjustly shot for desertion in WWI.

Alyson Grant’s Trench Patterns is an immersive spectacle. The lighting and sound are outstanding, and Guy Sprung’s direction in this Infinithéâtre production does full justice to the piece’s haunting experience. The play itself seldom departs from the hospital cell setting, which effectively facilitates a “brain in a vat” exploration of Jacqueline’s febrile consciousness. One by one, hallucinatory figures from both wars appear on the platform—vignettes that each pledge the case of abject humanity.

On the surface, the play questions the paradoxical concept of a “just war” and the “good soldier”—nothing new there. Yet what is new, is an ambitious creation a character distressed by a double-stranded memory, which oscillates between her great grandfather’s tragic fate in WWI, and her own participation in the Afghan conflict. It certainly baffles temporal and spatial logic to enact scenes from both wars, almost a century apart, in a hospital ward­­­­—unless this straddling of time occurs in a character suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Even so, the show requires some willful suspension of disbelief.

This is especially necessary in Jacqueline’s imaginary conversation with her great-grandfather, and her evocation of painstakingly real scenes from WWI. Of these, she has no first-hand experience—after all, she has only read about them in history books. The audience’s bewilderment mirrors Jacqueline’s disorientation in a play that, for the most part, operates at the expense of logic. Were it not for Patricia Summersett’s riveting performance as Jacqueline, the play may have failed to convince on a structural level—however surrealistic in tone Grant intends it to be.

However, it is Jacqueline’s hallucinatory plunge into history that rescues the binding theme the play desperately needs. In her introduction, Grant notes that her play is about “how a past family member’s life … can shape those in the following generations.” It is Jacqueline’s attempt to reconcile her identity as a soldier with her particular familial history that ultimately rewards a genuine comprehension of what the play alludes to.

Throughout, Jacqueline is either stuck in bed, propped up in a wheelchair, or limping across the stage; all states generate sincere pathos. The title of the play derives its name from the often twisted and zig-zagged patterns of the communication trench in WWI. Jacqueline’s road to recovery, thus, requires not only the psychiatrist (also played by Zach Fraser) and her mother (Diana Fajrajsl) to understand her, but also the audience, to make sense of her long recuperative process, physical and mental, as she interrogates both her past and present.

Grant is evidently an able playwright. Commendably, there is an almost Beckettian tinge to the wonderfully conceived character of Jacqueline. Yet Trench Patterns is very much just a demonstration of potential, raw talent on display; on the whole, it is much too ambitious, and consequently falls a little flat.

Trench Patterns runs through Nov. 18 at Bain St-Michel (5300 St-Dominque); Tuesday to Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Student admission is $20.