Racing Mount Pleasant - Racing Mount Pleasant Review

A record that reaches for intimacy on a larger scale, tracing the line between influence and identity with both confidence and uncertainty.

In the late aughts, La Blogothèque’s Take Away Shows stripped indie music to its bones. Grainy footage, stairwell acoustics, musicians in cramped elevators tearing pages from books for percussion, horns blaring into open air - the series carved out a feeling more than a format. What made those sessions powerful wasn’t the lo-fi novelty; it was the way they turned ordinary environments into temporary sanctuaries. You could feel the air in the room, the hesitation before a note, the sense that the moment could fall apart at any second.

Racing Mount Pleasant’s second album carries a faint echo of that intimacy. Not because the band is nostalgic, but because they write with the assumption that music should feel communal and authentic. In 2025, when so much indie is polished to an algorithmic shine or compressed into 28-minute bursts, this record chooses to breathe. On their self-titled LP, their first under the Racing Mount Pleasant name after releasing earlier work as Kingfisher, now on R&R, they lean into looseness and scale without treating either as affectation.

The Black Country, New Road comparison floats around them, and superficially it tracks: large ensemble, brass, escalating arrangements. But emotionally, they’re operating on a different axis. BCNR builds tension through narrative sprawl, verbal density, and technical execution. Racing Mount Pleasant builds it through movement - where a horn arrives, how group vocals push forward, when an arrangement tightens or suddenly gives way. Their emotional core leans more structural than lyrical.

You hear it immediately on the title track. The group-vocal climax arrives unpolished and breath-forward, the moment a producer would normally iron out. But that’s what gives it weight - you can hear people in the room, not stacked harmonies. It recalls the instinctive swell of a crowd catching a line at the exact same time.

When the band leans into that instinct, their influences come into sharper relief. The horn line closing ‘Your New Place’ feels lifted straight from the emotional arc of Beirut’s ‘Postcards From Italy,’ that gentle rise and soft collapse that lands like memory. ‘You’ opens with a pendulum-strum that echoes the dim, late-night calm of Blind Pilot’s ‘Oviedo.’ ‘Call It Easy, Call It Quits’ sits comfortably in the emotional register of Bon Iver, Bon Iver: the suspended lift of “Perth,” the humid falsetto haze of “Hinnom, TX.” These aren’t decorative references; they’re the emotional vocabulary the band works within.

But fluency doesn’t always equal identity. The album’s warmth is tied to the sounds it evokes, and sometimes those echoes cast longer shadows than the band’s still-forming perspective. Racing Mount Pleasant rarely slip into imitation, but they also don’t consistently outrun their influences. They sound like a band with a clear sense of what moves them, still figuring out how to make that sound unmistakably theirs.

The pacing makes this more noticeable. At nearly an hour, the record asks for sustained attention, and a few tracks can’t hold the weight. ‘Tensed Shallows’ and ‘Heavy Red’ contain thoughtful arranging choices but lose their tension after strong openings. ‘Seminary’ and ‘You’ drift by gently, pleasant but too soft-edged to anchor the album’s center. None of these songs falter individually; it’s the overall shape that starts to blur.

Then ‘Emily’ arrives and cuts through the haze. It’s the album’s most focused and emotionally coherent moment. Patient in its buildup, clear in its layering, and genuinely cathartic in its final minute as sax and trumpet collide with sharp intention. It’s the one place where Racing Mount Pleasant sound fully themselves, not because they’ve abandoned their influences, but because they’ve reframed them.

Even when the record wanders, its intent is unmistakable. Racing Mount Pleasant want arrangements to carry emotional weight, to let horns and strings behave like characters rather than ornamentation, to use group vocals as something other than a grand gesture. They want scale without spectacle and intimacy without shrinking. In a musical landscape that often rewards smallness, their sincerity reads as its own kind of ambition.

Racing Mount Pleasant doesn’t completely define who the band is in their post-Kingfisher era, but it points toward something promising. When everything aligns, the music feels human and immediate, big without being bombastic, loose without losing shape. And even when it misses, you can hear what they’re reaching for: a sound large enough to feel communal and human enough to feel real.