With their long introductions, their slowly installing psych pop and especially their soaring vocal harmonies, Races is a band I have seen two times with the same in-awe-state-of mind when they play. They have not disappointed with the recent release of their EP, ‘Big Broom’, which has only 3 songs, but opens our appetite for their upcoming full-length album.
When the played at the Echo on Thursday night, they hardly fit on the small stage as Races is a large band, six on stage, and their sound matches their number: it is a big expansive one, driven by guitars and especially male-female vocals, with Frontman Wade Ryff, Devon Lee, and Breanna Wood, giving these three part harmonies, beautiful ascending and lyrical chants, which instantaneously hit home.
They opened with an unreleased song,’ The Knife’, a slow psych melancholic number with an addictive chord progression (as many of their songs) that they had surrounded by more guitars riffs than before.
Wade Ryff and his bandmates, guitarist Garth Herberg, bassist Oliver Hild, singer-percussionist Devon Lee, singer-keyboardist Breanna Wood and drummer Lucas Ventura build these intense songs, full of layered sounds, that could calm you down and ravage you at the same time. Their wild landscapes of larger-than-the-room sound inevitably produced a sort of warmth surrounding the music, and Ryff’s voice had that sort of wide-eyed juvenile tonality while being powerful, and nicely completed by Hild’s high vocals.
‘Hope & Gloom’, with its upbeat-nostalgic melody and its slow pounding drumming and percussion, had this unseizable quality of bittersweet feelings like The Kinks’ Strangers, ‘All for You’ had some accents of that other Los Angeles local band, Edward Sharpe and the magnetic Zeros, while the rest of the songs composing their too-short set, was a mix of unreleased songs and songs featuring on their Big Broom EP. All of them had this savage beauty, these spacious and passionate soundscapes exacerbated by this arising sound.
Wade Ryff was walking back and forth on stage, as if he was mimicking the waves of sounds of their atmospheric numbers, but what you notice above everything at a Races show, are the impressive, poignant, almost over-the-top vocals serving the very memorable melodies. Their upcoming album, 'Year Of The Witch’, will be released next year on Frenchkiss Records, and they may become as big as their sound is.