Do you ever feel like you don’t know what day it is? Or maybe, when you bump into an old friend or go someplace you’ve not been in a while, you forget what year it is altogether, like you got in some reversing DeLorean and went back to the past?
To stand at the foot of the stage and watch Midwest indie kids Racing Mount Pleasant arpeggiate their guitars and bear their fragile egos – that is to lose track of the decades.
The Ann Arbor, MI outfit (FKA ‘Kingfisher’) are touring their second, self-titled album released in the summer of last year. They passed through Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom Monday, showing off the gorgeous textures and affecting vulnerability that have got fans so excited.
The show starts in an unassuming fashion. There is an initial roar as band members filter out on stage, but things fall to a hush: the innumerable band members appear to bottle-neck at the stage door before pausing to tune their even less numerable instruments.
The show opens with a new, apparently unnamed track. Fans of Racing Mount Pleasant (the album) can be assured of more of the same frantic melancholies, the same cinematic layer cakes. The instrumentation – the guitar-drummer axis, the driving force here, is attended by varying iterations of saxophone, trumpet and violin – are part of what brings such emotion to the music. It is a tried and tested combination that has worked for so many chamber pop/rock bands and there is something deeply redolent, almost jarring, about watching a violin played between a guitar and a bass like this.
But it takes a while for the ebb and flow of the set list to click, perhaps because their music has so many speeds. Each song is its own micro-verse of depression and elation, whispering and screaming, and it takes a while to settle into. Then again, perhaps it is the sub-freezing temperatures outside and the palpability of Dry January drifting up from the empty bar downstairs.
It isn’t until about a third of the way in during You, the eight-minute two-part ballad, that it feels like the whole thing really falls into place. What had initially struck me as unremarkable in singer Sam DuBose’s vocals – the studied voice crack and the spittle-producing screams – flower here into something much more profound. He is at his best in this wispy falsetto, and there is both a control and a power throughout which shock me. I can hear him a capella even as he wanders meters from his mic, and while he doesn’t miss a note the entire show there is nothing here to overbear any of his peers.
DuBose shouts out his sister somewhere in the crowd, and there are intermittent cries from friends of the band. The show begins to have the intimacy of a bedroom performance, of singing round a campfire, more than it does a large-venue rock concert.
From this point on, the band come out swinging, dropping the three most energetic songs in their catalogue in a frenzied third quarter. It seems the seven of them (I have finally been able to establish) have fully shed their chills too, as eyes that were cast down at shoes now look provocatively out at the crowd.
It can be genuinely hard to tell which instrument is making which sound; as with DuBose’s vocals, they appear to sacrifice the individual to elevate the whole. During “Emily” it takes me several bars to notice that the melody is plucked out not by some prerecorded synthesizer but by the violinist standing in front of my eyes.
There are several such moments on the record, like the breakdown at the end of Your New Place. It feels like the three wind instruments, each tired of skipping and jumping around the chords as individuals, collapse like a wave into one monolithic superhorn. It’s an effect unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. There are moments where your eyes and your ears are telling you different things: you can see three people playing, but somehow you can only hear one rendered down, ultra-rich sound.
It is a that shame that most of the band are tethered to microphones: “Racing Mount Pleasant,” with its earworm hook and its ensemble yelling (“I don’t know the reason why / I can’t read your mind”), seems to call for jumping around, fists pumping in the air like you’ve finally kissed your crush. In general there is a shy presence to the band, cocooned perhaps in the blanket of one another’s playing. They seem most animated when collectively nailing a tricky time signature.
There is an earnestness, a healthy dose of sentimentality to it all, and some have characterized Racing Mount Pleasant’s work as derivative. It does not take a genius to listen to the latest album and pick out strong influences: they lie at the confluence of contemporary post-rock, Midwest emo and noughties indie folk. But it takes a cynical ear to say this is just a composite of things that have come before.
To do so would be to not only ignore the essential beauty of this music (the album is as compelling as it is heartwrenching), but to entirely miss the point: this is music steeped in nostalgia and longing for the past.
To begin with, the band are not exactly hiding their musical references. The debut album’s title Grip Your Fists I’m Heaven Bound is a clear nod to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven,” while the closing lyrics of “Seminary” echo exactly those of Bon Iver’s “Holocene.”
And judging by the reception from their decisively Gen Z, decisively adoring crowd, with its wistful adornment of mustaches, mullets and sheepswool sweaters, this is a nostalgia shared with an entire generation.
(Special mention must go at this point to the individual standing front left who danced and whooped throughout the night with an abandon uncommon at an indie show. Quite possibly no one has called for an encore as loudly before, ever.)
The lyrics themselves are almost entirely timeless: unlike most contemporary music, there is almost nothing to pin this anxiety and heartbreak to today’s anxiety-inducing and heartbreaking world. “I like what you did with the built-in,” sings DuBose on Your New Place, during the only chronological market on the album, “To hold your video tapes.”
But despite all this vibe of cultivated nostalgia, there is a real sense of freshness in the performance. Songs are sung clear-eyed and there is a youthful humanity and warmth to the way the band members hold one another’s gaze. The drummer, adorably, is drinking a soda behind the kit.
“So get in my lungs or I swear I’ll die / The feeling of your warmth as you hold me tight,” sings DuBose on “Racing Mount Pleasant.” On this frigid evening, he is capturing the mood: “The snow lays heavy on my freezing mind… Can we stay inside?”
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