Rock Plaza Central Finish New Album

Toronto's Rock Plaza Central have recorded their new album and will release it themselves on May 12.

The 13-song, 42-and-a-half-minute record tentatively has the lengthy title of ...At The Moment Of Our Most Needing Or If Only They Could Turn Around, They Would Know They Weren't Alone. It's tiring just to type that.

Rock Plaza Central self-released Are We Not Horses in 2006. The concept album about robotic horses that thought they were real horses slowly built momentum and allowed the rootsy folk-rock septet to tour extensively in support of it.

"Basically, we played wherever people asked us, not really understanding the size of this continent or how much it would cost us to keep crossing it," singer/guitarist Chris Eaton wrote in a MySpace blog entry on Wednesday. "The first time we played NYC, we were scared shitless, but when we started the first song, everyone knew the words, and I was so stunned I didn't sing it."

Are We Not Horses seemed to have a deep impact on many new fans, and was even added to the curriculum of a graduate contemporary English literature course at the University Of South Alabama. Sixth grade students at an Ottawa elementary school interpreted the album's "My Children, Be Joyful" as "trying something new, reaching towards something they hadn't before" and revisualized the lyrics in drawings.

Expectations are therefore pretty high for this new album, which Eaton wrote was recorded in the same studio by "the same group of people (minus Rob who had just move to NY and couldn't cross the border, but with the addition of the wonderful trumpet player Louis Apicello from Sgt Dunbar and the Hobo Banned)."

"(Don't You Believe The Words Of) Handsome Men," one of the songs from this new concept record, can be streamed on Rock Plaza Central's MySpace page.

"Much of it is inspired by William Faulkner's Light in August, about a young woman who, at 8 1/2 months pregnant, goes off in search of the man she thinks is in love with her," wrote Eaton of the album's genesis. "She has no shoes but she has faith.

"The record is perhaps my love song to her. Searching for her. About thirteen months pregnant. And even when she rebukes me, I will know the world was good enough."

Here are Rock Plaza Central's dates:

March 19 Kingston, ON @ Apple Crisp Festival w/Reuben DeGroot
March 20 London, ON @ Call The Office w/Timber Timbre
March 21 Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern w/Key Witness and Afie Jurvanen
March 22 Hamilton, ON @ The Casbah w/Akron/Family

Here are the songs on the forthcoming Rock Plaza Central album:

"Oh I Can"
"A Mule On Fire"
"(Don't You Believe The Words Of) Handsome Men"
"O Lord, How Many Are My Foes"
"(The World Is) Good Enough"
"Country C"
"Them That Are Good And Them That Are Bad"
"The Wrong Side Of The Right"
"Holy Rider"
"The Long Dead March"
"We Are Full Of Light (That Blinds Us At The Moment Of Our Most Needing)"
"Wherever You Are, I'm Home"
"The Hot Blind Earth"