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 tour together 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.
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