Novelists are sad, sad people. Rock Plaza Central's lead singer Chris Eaton has written two novels:
The Grammar Architect and
The Inactivist. I haven't read them, but if his prose is anywhere near as good as his songs (which I have a sneaking suspicion that they are) they are probably better than anything I will ever write, especially this little post. I recently picked up RPC's first indepedent release
The World Was Hell to Us (2003), and its much different than their runaway hit
Are We Not Horses? (2006), but these discrepancies are forgivable, even applaudable. Their newer record is big: a concept album questioning subjectivity, epistemology, perhaps even Cartesian mind/body dualism, which is accompanied by big instrumentation (nearly every song teems with accordians, mellophones, trombones, banjos, violins,etc.)
The World is more sparse, but in this simplicity there is no-nonsense heartache. After just a few listens, I would claim that the highlights is "You Don't Need" a song about the autonomous self, and the loneliness a life surrounded by others selves with whom you will never actually connect. The themes from
Are We Not Horses are still here, but in less metaphoric, one could say, poetic sense.
Horses is a poem;
The World is a novel.
The single for this album is "The Things that Bind You", vaguely reminscent to my favorite song on
Horses "How We Go, When We Go Pt. 1". The raw eroticism and pangs of unrequited love and acceptance excudes from every pore of this band and this album outlines the heights of where this band can and will go. Don't get me wrong, this album is not an outline, but a fully fleshed out work of art. I agree with Chris Eaton, and I almost have my self convinced that "I don't need" anything outside myself. Except this album.
Check out their songs from both albums here:
http://rockplazacentral.com/index.html
http://myspace.com/rockplazacentral
And Eaton's Novels here:
http://rockplazacentral.com/novels.html
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