Rock Plaza Central - At The Moment Of Our Most Needing (2009)

If ever there were a band name that does not suggest the music played by that group, it's Rock Plaza Central, the Toronto outfit organized by singer/songwriter Chris Eaton. With its acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, and accordion, plus a couple of horns and a rhythm section, all sawing and tooting and tapping away, this bunch should be called something like Folk Holler Outpost instead. And the word "Holler" would refer both to the rural corruption of "hollow" and to Eaton's singing voice, an imperious yelp unencumbered by notions of key or pitch. The voice is appropriate to the playing behind him, however, as the tracks aim for the effect of field recordings by players who have put down their farm utensils for musical instruments and, perhaps, just grabbed whichever ones were handy. So, the performances lurch along with a just-above-competence, second-run-through feel (except for some of the guitar playing, which, if not exactly crisp, nevertheless evinces a bit more practice). Of course, these are not illiterate field hands, even if they're not exactly professionals, either. Eaton, for one, boasts the publication of a couple of novels to his credit and told his publicist that the inspiration for his songwriting here came from William Faulkner's Light in August. That inspiration doesn't seem to have had any particular effect on his words, which tend toward repeated chants that don't make any literal sense. ("When we fall far from the light, will it make our darkness bright?," he and his bandmates sing over and over again in "Them That Are Good and Them That Are Bad.") But it is indicative of the distance between the rural roots suggested by this music and the music itself, a distance measured not only in time and place, but also in intention.