Mimicking Birds: Mimicking Birds

The music of Mimicking Birds is driven and characterized by space. All kinds of it, really. When Portland-based singer/songwriter Nate Lacy isn’t singing of intergalactic saloons and far off moons, he is delving lyrically into the intricacies and eerie silence of the natural world. The music isn’t much different. Think Jose Gonzalez on a sci-fi kick or The Moon and Antarctica-era Modest Mouse on ludes. Fragile, melancholy and complexly surreal, their debut full-length on Issac Brock’s imprint Glacial Pace quietly appears out of the dense, woods of the Northwest and builds a nest into your speakers. Full of warm, milky reverb and cyclical guitar lines glazed over a blanket of elaborate sound textures, Mimicking Birds’ first LP is an intimate, moody affair perfect for late evenings or early Sundays. As impressive of a debut as it is, the album as a whole does falter slightly from feeling a bit monochromatic as a whole. Lacy doesn’t have a particularly compelling voice and his melodies are more hypnotic than catchy. If you’re not paying close enough attention, you might easily miss out on all the elaborate stuff going on here, but if you give it to them, they’ll definitely pull you in.