No Album Left Behind: Racing Mount Pleasant change their name and make a sprawling, intimate re-introduction

The band’s (fittingly self-titled) first record under their new name is sprawling but self-assured. It’s a concept album, in a fast-and-loose sense of the term, all about memory: thematic and narrative tissue connects the bookends of the album, with lyrics revolving around two distinct memories. The first is a memory of the album’s narrator waking up in his partner’s old apartment and watching them gently wake up beside him. The second memory is from some time after the first, after the couple has drifted apart and the narrator visits his ex’s new place on the 34th floor of an apartment building. The album’s 13 tracks explore these two memories, approaching them from different angles, each warp and weft a different shade of the same two stories—if the record is a quilt (perfect for a Midwestern winter), the songs are the individual panels making it up.

The album opens and closes with the same motifs: “Your New Place” and “Your Old Place,” while thematically linked by those two memories, are also linked by a central character (Emily, who we can assume is the partner) and a musical leitmotif (a lone guitar riff and an agonizing, aching violin swell). The entire record is set in these parameters of recollection—set standing in an ex’s new place, staring out at a panoramic view of Lake Erie and remembering a different home in a different time. It’s a device that could be boring in others’ hands, but Racing Mount Pleasant makes the most out of every second. The memories create a cohesion, one buoyed by the fact that nearly every song also plays with a sense of loud and quiet, with the band building a world where time and space feel on the verge of collapse at any moment.

As its frigid, borderless cover art suggests, the album is cold and moody in sound and grand, sprawling in scale. The band prefers to take their time over these tracks, often traversing great distances to arrive not at a singular destination but an encompassing feeling: “You’re the edge of all I know,” sings vocalist Sam DuBose, finally, two minutes into “Your New Place.” The line comes after roughly 120 seconds of tender guitar and saxophone—a stillness that builds up to the album’s true beginning, propelling the song into a second movement. The song is a fitting introduction, featuring calling cards that will populate the intimate corners of the record: snowy meditations on distance and perspective; cinematic instrumentation; elusively sketched characters and relationships; and the feeling that, at any moment, a song might transform into something completely different.

The ghostly “Tenspeed (Shallows)” picks apart that first memory of waking up in Emily’s old place. DuBose questions the validity of his own memory, asking in hypnotic repetition: “Do you still see yourself as you were that night?” over 27 times. Then, Racing Mount Pleasant combines its many strengths—the push and pull of noise and stillness, the atmospheric arrangements, the lush strings and horns—to produce the album’s opus: “Emily,” a standout track that shines a light directly onto the album’s primary character while our narrator reflects on the end of their relationship. Like “Your New Place,” it begins softly, with tender fingerpicking and warm horns. But then the crescendo builds before it breaks. “But what about me, ‘cause I’m dying too,” screams DuBose, with a touch of Adrienne Lenker in his wail.

The record’s core comes in two parts, the first of which is “You,” where DuBose’s voice echoes Justin Vernon’s as he claims “no one really knows she’s drunk when she’s in lovе” above a shimmery backing of sultry sax. The other shoe drops on “You Pt. 2,” as the band coalesces into a unified rising harmony—a harmony that never shatters into the expected cacophony to follow. Instead, at every turn, the group chooses restraint, pulling the song back into itself. The relief arrives, then, from the repeated phrase, “I’ll fall back into you,” sung across the spectrum of whisper to howl. “You” and “You Pt. 2” serve as the bridge between these two memories: “We’re just two strangers by the bedside,” sings DuBose on the latter, and we’re left wondering which memory we’re standing in.

That tension between softness and sharpness reappears on “Call It Easy,” the record’s first single—and the song the band used to introduce themselves as Racing Mount Pleasant. It’s another 7-minute epic, this time rising from gentle tenderness to sharp-toothed bite and back again, all of it exact and controlled. It’s no wonder this song was chosen as the first taste of the band’s new name: the track displays their technical and artistic brilliance, as well as their songwriting ambitions, which, while present on their debut record, were not fully realized.

After “34th Floor”—a Hans Zimmer-style instrumental—we return to where we started on “Your Old Place.” DuBose sounds the most like ex-Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood here, as he reflects on the end of his relationship with Emily. We finally witness the culmination of the musical motif alluded to in “Your New Place,” that guitar and violin riff, bursting into a swirling thrum of catharsis at long last. But—just when it seems our narrator has found some solace in closure, there’s an abrupt cut-off and the vaguely horrified realization of: “Oh my god, is this just how it ends?” It is. The album ends.

You can certainly listen to Racing Mount Pleasant and hear echoes of their artistic touchstones. It’s impossible not to. But this album is an accomplishment for a band of relative youth; it’s a cinematic work of art that gives Racing Mount Pleasant a deserved spot in the conversation with their predecessors. It’s a beautiful record—beautiful in the same way a harsh and bleak Midwest winter is beautiful. And at its end, you emerge in the sunlight of spring, eager to get outside and start living.