Rock Plaza Central, Rebecca West, Tusks

Been meaning to do this for a while, but better late than never. When I saw Steve Wynn last month one of the openers was a Toronto band, Rock Plaza Central, that I quite enjoyed, especially this stirring, too-brief song.

• Rock Plaza Central, “How Shall I to Heaven Aspire?”

Their latest record, Are We Not Horses, which I picked up at the show in a sign of how much I liked their set, appears to be a concept album about, um, mechanical artificially intelligent horses and the travails thereof. (We sure have come a long way from the days when all concept albums had to be about a future world where rock is outlawed.) They seem to get hit with Neutral Milk Hotel comparisons a lot, which is fair enough, I guess, and there’s also a bit of Mountain Goat John Darnielle’s declamatory singing style in the vocals of Chris Eaton, the Rock Plaza Central mainman. But they do have a sound of their own.

And Chris Eaton is also a novelist, author of The Inactivist and The Grammar Architect (the latter billed as a cover of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes – I have a soft spot for literary covers, and musical ones too).

And wait, the associations don’t end there. Playing with Rock Plaza Central that night was one Allison Outhit, who was in a Halifax band called Rebecca West back in the mid-1990s, putting out (I think) only one full-length. It’s called Burners On and I liked it a whole lot, kind of compact-crunchy guitar pop. Eaton writes that Outhit is an old friend and that her current band is called Tusks. So, well, here you go.

• Rebecca West, “Absolute Fact”
• Tusks, “Mothers vs. Sons”

(Go to the Rock Plaza Central site and buy their stuff here, and go to their Myspace page here, and go to the Tusks Myspace page here. And buy The Inactivist here and The Grammar Architect here.)