Some bands sound like a bunch of college kids who thought it would be cool to speedrun the first three years of Arcade Fire, and Racing Mount Pleasant is one of them. Almost none have that as their actual origin story, but Racing Mount Pleasant is one of them. After an auspicious debut single, “Call it Easy,” the Ann Arbor septet truly introduced itself with its next release: a song named “Racing Mount Pleasant” that announced an album, also called Racing Mount Pleasant. This isn’t just a band with grand ambitions; it’s one that arrives with a mythology. The first melodic line on opener “Your New Place” recurs on the closer, “Your Old Place,” and the 53 minutes in between feature a litany of lyrical callbacks, a multi-part suite of “You” and “You Pt. 2,” and palette-cleansing instrumentals. This is a band that has thought in definitive statements from the start, yet all the grand gestures of Racing Mountain Pleasant arrive like foregone conclusions. It sounds like a group working hard to make a cathartic, cleansing instant classic of a debut, but one drawn from memory.
But man, it really can sound like a cathartic, cleansing instant classic. “Your New Place” immediately heralds the arrival of The Next Great Orchestral Collective, its every move either invigorating or inevitable based on previous knowledge of Great Orchestral Collectives. There’s the scene-chewing, beatless introduction, the military snare rolls that signal the part where things start speeding up imperceptibly, the guitars that come in around that time that are distorted by sheer force of strumming. There are woodwinds and horns, jazzy chord voicings and orchestral flourishes that never go too far in classing up what still sounds like the work of 20-something friends sharing a house together. It’s got the panoramic sweep of post-rock, but the intimacy of Midwest emo—call it Whenever, Bon Iver, or Maize and Blue Country, New Road.
It’s not that far off from Racing Mount Pleasant’s previous incarnation as Kingfisher, which produced Grip Your Fist, I’m Heaven Bound. While operating with more confident arrangements and production, Racing Mount Pleasant is still a project that oozes influence, every maneuver coming with footnotes. It’s easy to talk about who they sound like, less so to explain what they are like. The lyrics sheet contains the raw elements of a novelistic breakup narrative: meet-cutes, betrayal, romance, sex. There’s a recurring character named Emily, but she’s never given any definition; the “34th floor/Of your new place” remains unknowable beyond a few pieces of interior decoration. The glacial chamber pop of “You” and “Call it Easy” strive for “cinematic” but lack a compelling narrator to drive the plot forward, an Isaac Wood or Justin Vernon or Win Butler or Tom Diaz losing their composure within the ornate compositions and creating enough friction to modulate the emotional arc. Occasionally, a satisfying jolt of dissonance arrives—the screeching horn blasts in “Emily,” gang vocals on the title track—but there’s little here that Racing Mount Pleasant can call their own. Its signifiers of struggle can seem like a stylized streetwear pic in Carhartt —it’s a damn fine tee, but are they really getting their hands dirty?
Bands and albums of this nature don’t come around all that often. Great Orchestral Collectives need to exist in contrast to a default character, stressing the sacrifice and passion required to sustain such an unwieldy format and deliver what your average power trio or singer-songwriter cannot. That kind of drive is extremely volatile, and Racing Mount Pleasant evokes versions of the aforementioned bands that ran up hard against their expiration dates. Black Country, New Road completely inverted their songwriting process after Wood disappeared from public life; The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die shed members and now sound like a metalcore band; Bon Iver has never made the same album twice; and Arcade Fire have only returned to their core sound out of pure desperation. “My god, you’ve got excellent taste/You’re a high risk, high reward,” Sam DuBose intones on “Your New Place,” speaking in character but also angling for a tagline for Racing Mount Pleasant. The band exhibits good taste; the rewards are high when you allow yourself to get caught up in the curation and craft. But their music lacks any proof that creating their masterpiece wasn’t something they chose to do, but something they had to do—the result of the compulsion to be yourself completely and embracing all the risk that comes with it.
