At a glance, there doesn't appear to be anything terribly original about Chicago's Mister Lies. Surfacing in 2012, the project followed just about every unwritten rule in the up-and-coming, home-schooled electronic producer playbook. The Hidden Neighbors EP-- a seductive, downtempo affair informed by strains of subterranean, laptop-engineered music from the UK-- was released under a cloak of anonymity. After revealing himself as Columbia College student Nick Zanca, a 7" and an "ambient gospel" collaborative EP with fellow Chicagoan Different Sleep followed, though neither proved quite as compelling as his initial effort. And finally, last summer, Zanca holed himself up in a lakeside cabin in Vermont to record his first proper full-length, Mowgli. But despite the buzzworthy pretenses surrounding his debut, Mowgli feels refreshingly untethered to anything other than Zanca's own impulsive yet careful direction. Instead of becoming encumbered by its heavy reliance on mood and atmosphere, Mowgli's patient nature makes room for some serpentine-like twists turns that often bear rich and strange fruits. Though the footing may not always be so sure, it's a record worth paying attention to thanks to it's reluctance to walk a too-familiar plank.
"My music has to do with imaginary things," Zanca told Pitchfork back in May, and while Mowgli most certainly has a well-mapped root structure (he name-checked Portishead, Burial, and "1990s trip-hop" in the same interview), it's so curious and elusive, you feel as if an Inception-style plundering of his daydreaming would be the only real way to unpack it, however subtle and simple its defining components might seem. Still, Zanca is most likely a lucid dreamer, as his knack for creating standalone sounds-- the almost uncomfortably sharp handclaps on opener "Ashore", percussive elements that sound as if they were secretly recorded in a decaying old apartment building on "Dionysian"-- makes the album feel very much of this earth. But despite not being quite impervious to gravity, Mowgli's ultimately an act of auditory hypnosis egged on by repetition and lush textures. A good number of these songs are landlocked by similar swaths of beatific fog, as familiar shapes remain a bit too blurred to really make out. But as Zanca lifts his various veils, these songs reveal themselves in unsettling, warm, or chaotic ways that feel shy, sexy, and more than a little scary, sometimes all at once. Though few records can really claim it as an asset, Mowgli invites return listens because it's so difficult to put your finger on.
Zanca's neatest trick on Mowgli is being able to emulsify opposing sounds in interesting ways, evoking a wide stretch of emotions over seemingly tiny soundscapes. Often times, it sounds like it's stuck between two different rooms, as the noise from either collides in ways that almost nauseate at first, but become harmoniously fractured as they slowly sync. "Ashore" feels like the work of a trendy, tweezer-wielding chef, plating various components just so until a huge wave of cotton-candy wrapped synth blows everything off the table. "Align" manages to juggle Four Tet-like euphoria, a burly, wormy synth line and ghostly wails and still make sense of it all. "Dionysian" is both joyful and hellish, a headrush of a track that culminates in a cacophonous rage, blowing hot all the while. But not all of Zanca's creations are so cleverly caustic-- "Ludlow", named for the Vermont town where Mowgli was born, is funky, sultry, and comfort food-y in ways that make it fully apparent why Zanca chose to record there.
For someone not yet old enough to legally drink, Zanca is ahead of the game in a lot of respects, but it doesn't mean he's impervious to the same trappings that present themselves to every young musician, especially ones who make music as insular as Mister Lies does. Too often Mowgli feels like a series of exercises, its mantra-like repetitions eventually rendering themselves somewhat directionless. Other times, things simply don't pan out at all, like "Canaan", which features a poem that came straight from freshman AP English class, or the jittery "Lupine", darting around like a sloppy game of racquetball. Over the course of a year, Zanca has proved himself to be a musician than can produce songs that are interesting and songs that are actually just plain great, and in working to find that balance on Mowgli, we can see that while it's engaging to watch him try and synthesize these two halves of his personality, it also means that Mister Lies is a project that's still in need of fine tuning. There's little question that Zanca knows where he wants to go, it's now just a question of figuring out how he wants to get there.
