The Mimicking Birds are poised for more success with more new music and a lot of talk about science

By Douglas McDaniel

The Mimicking Birds are well named, since the Portland, Oregon based band's music has a lush natural sound whose vocalist Nate Lacy has a free flowing melodic sensibility floating above a thicket of understated tinkling guitars, thorny, textured layers of it, and pattering drums. He sings like a bird, or maybe a wayward choirboy, his vocals taking surprising turns in the air, finding the light in the dense murk of sounds.

Brought along in the music world by Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse, the indie rock of the Mimicking Birds got the big lift when they recorded tracks at his house in Portland, where both bands are based, and then signed onto Glacial Pace Recordings.

"I’d gotten connected with Isaac Brock through Glacial Pace Recordings after a friend of mine sent them an email with a link to my songs -- unbeknownst to me,." Lacy says.  "Then one day I’d received a message from Glacial Pace -- a couple months later Isaac called me late one morning and discussed the possibility of recording some tracks at his house in Portland. I was going to community college in Eugene at the time.  A few months later I was at Isaac’s house recording songs in his attic with him and (Modest Mouse engineer) Clay Jones.

"Isaac is a huge influence lyrically and  instrumentally, " Lacy wrote by e-mail while on the road for the current tour, "particularly his project Ugly Casanova really excited me to start creating songs and recording them." Asked for a list of his favorite bands, he lists "Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Elliot Smith, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, Radiohead, Beck, Moody Blues, Bruce Cockburn, Crash Test Dummies, The Jingle Cats, and the majority of '90s alternative mega hits." There is something of a writer in Lacy as well, as he also listed such literary and scientific influences as Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, Einstein, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. 
"I love me some Dr. Seuss," he states, placing the first year of the band as "2008ish."

Soemthing of a rarity for many bands, Mimicking Birds make a special feature of their lyrics on the band page. As Lacy says, "I have always been into the words." And he's not kidding, with many songs going on into lengthy meditations on climate change, tsunamis and inner space. Is this connection to nature intentional or accidental?  You could probably pass a physics test by simply memorizing the vocabulary of Lacy's lyrical palette.

"Seems like the big question ...," he writes. "Is nature itself accidental or intentional?  I’d say both.  Have been obsessed with it since I can remember.  I still get just as excited by finding an insect, or by a powerful weather event as I did when I was a child.  This seems to be instinctively inherent in children and I definitely don’t feel like an adult yet (maybe old sometimes but not a grown up).  Which I’m certainly not alone on that front, but it does seem to fade as people grow older.  I think it’s important for our evolution’s potential to maintain that connection."

Where the album "Eons" launched the band with rave reviews due to the eerily atmospheric quality of the song with Lacy's airy vocals, the percolating drums and the ringy wash of guitar sounds, the new album is a departure in the sense it uses more synth-drumming and more keyboard sounds.

"I’ve always liked the sound of subtle synth blending into the acoustic recordings," he states. "I think it grew more with `Eons,` and recording with producer/engineer Jeremy Sherrer who brought a lot of that to the table. Especially percussion-wise.  Adam Trachsel (bassist in the band) is a synth freak as well.  I like the dark analog stuff like you’d here in '80s or early '90s action movies like 'The Terminator' films (Brad Fiedel)."
 
The new album, "Layers of Us," includes on track perhaps intended as a show-stopper, especially with the extended breakout instrumentals at the end, "Great Waves."

As Lacy writes, "There’s been a bunch of sensationalization the last few years on the West Coast about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a big quake and impending tsunami being long overdue. I surf often on the northern Oregon coast and would inevitably think about that while in the water or even just being at the beach. This probably heightened after the Japan quake/wave. I was trying to paint that ominous picture. Hard to comprehend the scale of such a thing."
He got his interest in the physical universe from his father.

 "I think it’s a good tool for conjuring up imagery and I’m infinitely fascinated with the patterns and precise geometry of such chaos," he says. "I think it can lend insight into perception of time and scale as well, and establish a mood/backdrop for the other details."

Originally published by Flagstaff Live