Hamilton Rocks: The Rest

The Rests latest album was so far gone that it took black box technology to bring it back.

Theirforthcoming record, Seesaw, is set to drop in Junebut that almost didn't happen.

The album was almostfinished a year ago, but then a hard drive glitch deleted every last notelost in a jumbled pile of ones and zeroes.

"Everyone told us it would be fairly easy to get it recovered," said Adam Bentley, their vocalist.

They were wrong. The album was gone.

"It was completely numbing It was very surreal," Bentley said. "I remember sitting in my basement and just thinking 'this can't be real.'"

The hard drive was bounced from one data recovery company to another, trying desperately to save months of hard work.

Finally, it landed with a place in Chicago that performs black box recovery for airplanes.

That did the trick, and their album was savedseven months later.

Amongst the uncertainty, the band wasn't stagnant. They've played around 150 gigs in Hamilton, bringing their show to stages across the city.

"We grew up onstage here," Bentley said. "I love being in this bubble."

That "bubble" is the city itself, which he said isn't under a microscope in the same way as a place like Toronto.

"What endeared me to Hamilton was that I can feel unencumbered to make any kind of music I want to," he said.

"To stay comfortable, play a lot of music and be creative, it's always made the most sense for me to be here."

As for their sound? That's a question Bentley tries to dodge.

"Brian Eno once said that if you try to explain yourself too much, it's like explaining a joke," he said.

The best he can do is to say that the Rest is a seven-piece pop band whose members draw from both strict classical backgrounds and some stark experimental influences.

The result is a dense, textured pop/rock sound -rich with reverb and orchestration. You can listen to the Rest onBandcamp, and follow them on Twitter@therestband.

You can also listen to other great Hamilton artists on the CBC Music Hamilton Rocks streamhere.