© 2024 Milwaukee Public Media is a service of UW-Milwaukee's College of Letters & Science
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Song Premiere: Mimicking Birds, 'Dead Weight'

Mimicking Birds.
Ben Moon
/
Courtesy of the artist
Mimicking Birds.

For years, Nate Lacy's Mimicking Birds project has been linked to his friends and colleagues in Modest Mouse. That band's singer, Isaac Brock, released both of Mimicking Birds' terrific studio albums on his Glacial Pace label, and both groups are scheduled to in August. They complement each other in other ways, too: Mimicking Birds' sinister, unsettling sound fits beautifully next to Modest Mouse's more frenetic excursions. They're cousins in mood and tone — different enough to stand clearly apart, yet equally inclined to allure and fascinate.

Mimicking Birds' 2014 album Eons is a masterfully creepy collection, but it's not all the band had in store after a four-year absence. Today, the band unveils a marvelous new song, "Dead Weight," that slithers smoothly into the band's discography. "I am a corpse, you are a corpse, and we're all the same," Lacy sings in the song's opening moments, and from there, "Dead Weight" doesn't exactly brighten. But it does embark on a few mysterious and surprising journeys through time and space — fatalistic, sure, but as gorgeous as can be.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)