Mimicking Birds is the spectral folk/home recording project of Portland's Nate Lacy. This, his first full-length under the MB guise, was produced by Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock for the latter's Glacial Pace imprint, a footnote that's actually no footnote at all. In addition to simply signing him, Brock has taken Lacy under his wing in recent years, bringing him along to open Modest Mouse amphitheater tours, and leaving behind audible prints on his studio efforts as well.
Lacy's extremely gifted with cyclical melodies: thorny, fingerpicked spines around which he can snake a range of sounds simply for ambience. He accomplishes a lot of that here by considering a lot of the same moods and midnight tones as Brock did on his masterstroke The Moon & Antarctica or his work in Ugly Casanova. The vocal layers in particular are used as backup instruments, garbled and muffled (see the thunderclapping coda of "New Doomsdays") as though they're being transmitted from other orbits. Yet on openers "Home and Somewhere Else" and the appropriately titled "The Loop", it works because of how close it all feels when streaming through headphones. Whether Lacy's whispering or rasping, purring or stretching out his falsetto, you can hear each inhale and exhale as though you're listening from inside the dude's chest cavity. Lyrically he keeps in time and rhyme with the nature of his picking, the effect just as riveting as it is meditative.
But much of the record's success relies on arrangement in lieu of variety. When Lacy introduces more to the fold, be it floating piano ("10 Percent") or strings ("Cabin Fever") or light horns ("Under and in Rocks"), the results are gorgeous. On the other end of the spectrum, "Them" falls totally flat without a tooth or hook to be found. It's actually a tough, restrictive way to operate as a songwriter, and when he breaks out, he's at his very best. Bookended by elliptical guitars, "Burning Stars" inverts his songwriting steez and blooms into a more traditional pop strummer. It's got great velocity, an achy-breaky melody, a terrific solo and even a few choruses and verses, too. It also doesn't sound like anyone but him.
