![]() The best songs - disc-opener "I Am an Excellent Steel Horse" and album high point "My Children, Be Joyful" - build slowly from subdued, single-instrument accompaniment for Eaton (usually fiddle, banjo or acoustic guitar) into frantic, strings- and horns-driven hoe-downs with full-throated singalong choruses. Singer Chris Eaton's strained warble - part Jeff Mangum and part early Will Oldham - stands like a sentinel at the front gate to these ramshackle compositions if Dave Berman's "all my favorite singers couldn't sing" adage resonates with you, then the rest of Are We Not Horses should reveal its many charms. ![]() Rock Plaza Central's music falls somewhere between country-rock and indie rock, with bits of the Band, Okkervil River, Palace and Neutral Milk Hotel surfacing as touchstones from time to time. ![]() Unfortunately for the concept, that's especially true if you take each song on its own merit and forget what one bandmember called the "cubist rock opera" behind them. So much more to their credit then that Toronto's Rock Plaza Central manage to pull it off on their Yep Roc debut and second record, Are We Not Horses. ![]() If wariness is your initial reaction to a concept record about six-legged robot horses battling with the forces of good and evil, it probably should be.
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