Despite being together for about nine years and being a fixture of the Sarasota indie music scene, Physical Plant has never released an album — until now.
The indie-psych band made up of guitarist Josh Scheible, guitarist-keyboardist Caegan Quimby, bassist David Baker and drummer Ryan McCarthy will release their debut full-length “What’s Laid Down” on Saturday. They’ll throw a record release show featuring The Beat Down and Lesa Silvermore Band at JDub’s Brewing and release a collaboration beer with the brewery called Fizzical Plant, a hemp seed ale with mango and lime.
The album has been a long time in the making, started in 2014 under a different lineup and featuring music dating all the way back to a chord progression Scheible wrote in high school before the band even existed.
“It basically encompasses all the songs that we had with this initial lineup that we hadn’t released yet,” Quimby said. “It completes the canon of all the original Physical Plant tunes.”
Physical Plant formed in January 2009 at New College of Florida with Quimby, Scheible and Lake Elrod, with Baker joining soon after. They became part of the thriving early-2010s Sarasota indie scene that included Fancy Rat and Teach Me Equals, then Bard and Mustache.
During that time, the group recorded an album’s worth of material they released as two EPs, in 2011 and 2013. Back then, they were working in a DIY mindset, recording in dorm rooms and bedrooms, and doing tracks individually with great time and care spent on each.
When making “What’s Laid Down,” Quimby said they wanted to record live in the studio like 1960s albums that they loved, though they ultimately ended up reworking a good deal of the recording. The band was inspired by ambitious releases such as The Beatles’ 1968 double disc best known as “The White Album.”
“We just wanted something big and sprawling that covered the full range of what we were doing,” Scheible said. “Cohesion was never really our thing. The idea that we could just cast the net as wide as possible, get everything and put it all in one record and it’s a record because we say it is.”
The group began recording the album in 2014. Then Elrod left to go to grad school and the band’s original drummer departed soon after.
For a while, the band stopped playing live and debated whether it would even continue. Then McCarthy, who was previously a big fan of the band, stepped in to play drums in 2015.
“I’m not on this album, but all the songs that are on this album were the songs that I used to go see them play that made me fall in love with the band in the first place,” McCarthy said. “So now I get to hear this album as a fan, but I get to play the tunes.”
After the group found its footing, it returned to finally finish “What’s Laid Down” and put it out. And it shouldn’t be another nine years until Physical Plant’s next album, as the group is eager to record more material with its current lineup.
“The silver lining here is that we’re releasing this record and now we’re looking to go in the studio to make another record in the next few months,” Quimby said.
By Jimmy Geurts