If you've ever been to the midwest, you'll know what I mean when I say that the region has a sort of melancholy. Once the centre of post-WWII American manufacturing dominance, it's now an assortment of rusted factories, vast farms, and acres and acres of nothing.
Perhaps because of this, the region has also spawned a lot of great music, most notably the genre Midwest Emo, which tends to tap into this very feeling. The artist always has elements of the melancholic; really, the act of creating art is an intrinsically melancholy one. You take infinite possibility, and refine it into a solid, real thing. You take the ineffable and translate it into being. A piece of art is defined by its lack, by what is left out, and what cannot be translated into symbols.[1]
The obvious comparison to Racing Mount Pleasant's self-titled release is Black Country, New Road's Ants from Up There, and while the comparison is warranted (both bands are somewhat characterised by long, complex song structures, prominent saxophone, and longing lyricism), Racing Mount Pleasant takes a folkier turn. It's softer, less hyperbolic, steeped more in nostalgia than Isaac Wood's lost futures. We're walking along the snowy shores of Lake Michigan, the rusted, abandoned factories on the horizon mere silhouettes in the fog. There's a more indie edge to Racing Mount Pleasant, the music is slightly rougher around the edges, but not in a bad way. You and Seminary wouldn't be out of place on a Bon Iver album, for example.
Really, the cover says it all. A spot of colour in a grey, cold world. Memories of a bright summer that gave way to a cold winter, nostalgia that creeps behind every corner. It's music for stepping into the unknown.
Footnotes
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This is one of my major arguments against the legitimacy of AI art. There are no choices made. When art is generated, there is no metaphysical process occurring, no refinement of reality. It is simply calculated inside a black box and spat out. In a Lacanian sense, the artist translates the real into the symbolic. For the AI, there is no real, and so, there is no symbolic. There are just images. ↩