The Los Angeles music scene is so rich, it’s rare I don’t discover a band I like each week. I had missed their Monday residency at the Bootleg last month, but I got to see Races at the Echo on Wednesday night, and I can tell that the large band knew how to make big statements with guitars and high-energy-multi-voice harmonies.
Their uplifting pop-rock tunes were most of the time guitar-driven but particularly soothed by Wade Ryff’s interesting ascending vocals often harmonizing with the female (Breanna Wood also on piano) and male voices of the band, creating layered and convoluted but rewarding melodies that fixed my attention from start to finish with the same enthusiastic curiosity.
And I don’t want to bring one more time the trite comparison with Arcade Fire, but well, I would not be the only one doing it, and there definitively were these same overblown and grandiose chorales that get me each time,… just watch the video below, which should be a new song of them.
But there also were some songs that had almost a Bowie-sque beat in them, and overall, there was a lot of energy in their set, and a drive that would lead them to some exploding rocking jams built by layers of textured sound produced by Wade Ryff and Garth Herberg’s guitars, but also keyboards, as Oliver Hild was alternating between the bass and the moog, with sometimes a guitar riff emerging from this fuzz stimulated by Devon Lee on percussion and Lucas Ventura on drums.
The band, which was formerly named Black Jesus, changed its name to Races after having a handful of complications in using their first moniker. They have just signed to New York based label Frenchkiss Records (Local Natives, the Dodos, the Hold Steady and Passion Pit) and will release a full-length album, ‘Year of the Witch’ this fall. So far they only have self-released a 7-inch (‘Big Broom’/’Living Cruel and Rude’), and you will not find much more on the internet as the band was quite recently formed, and, according to their bio, ‘after singer/songwriter Wade Ryff escaped the sweaty grips of multiple bands, the San Fernando Valley and a real life witch’. A witch? This is a very mysterious way to introduce yourself, errr, that would explain the ‘Big Broom’ title may be? And does he mean he had to use magic to create these soothing guitar-driven pop gems?