MIMIC – MIMIC Review

There’s a certain sound that you kind of expect to hear when you put on a metal album from New Orleans. The sludge, Southern rock, and blackened thrash styles that a lot of the town’s biggest bands trade in have become synonymous with NOLA metal. It’s a common enough theme in music that bands in specific scenes feed off each other, grow with each other, and even compete to take their specific playing style further than their peers. Put a bunch of metalheads with the same interests in the same area and it only makes sense that a definitive New Orleans, Chicago, Tampa, wherever sound will emerge as representative of the metal in your particular city. NOLA progressive-thrashers Mimic have taken the other route and tried to break out of the traditional sound of the Big Easy and make a name divorced from the traditional sounds of their city’s scene. 

On their self-titled demo EP, released in February, the band does a nice job of showcasing that, although their sound might come from New Orleans, they’re anything but a carbon copy of other NOLA bands that have come before them. When listening through the release, my mind went more towards Cynic, Atheist, and Symbolic-era Death rather than Eyehategod or Exhorder, although bassist and drum programmer Jorge Caicedo has spent time as a live member of the latter group.  It’s an exciting and ambitious release, particularly thanks to how seamlessly the duo of Caicedo and guitarist/vocalist Apollo Xydias (also of New Orleans thrashers Herakleion) manage to meld their different inspirations together into one cohesive package.

The record kicks off with “Within a Nulled Future” and Xydias’ guttural vocals pack an immediate punch. Throughout, Xydias’ delivery really comes through as one of the bigger selling points for Mimic as he’s more than capable of handling the proggy death metal style of vocals in a way that allows for pretty clear annunciation without sacrificing any of the brutality of his growling screams. From a composition standpoint, the opening song does a really nice job of building on itself as it ratchets up the intricacy of the instrumentation as it goes along. It’s a strong bit of songwriting and a smart choice to make it the opening number.

“Despotic Saviors,” the record’s second track, brings the band’s jazzy inspirations to the forefront and really demonstrates the diversity of influences that Mimic is pulling from. This one also demonstrates the band’s pretty strong lyric writing prowess as Xydias powers through lines like ““Comforting lies, malleable masses, duped through trickery, to further the ruse. Truth is anathema, propagate the lie, subjugate the populace, an era for the blind.” Two of the record’s three tracks are instrumentals but it’s nice that the ones that do have vocals have Xydias belting out thought provoking and interesting ideas rather than the same kind of tried and true fare that can almost run together.

The two instrumental tracks, “Mimesis” and the outro “Isolated Worlds,” both do effective jobs of showcasing the complexity of writing that Xydias and Caicedo are capable of. “Mimesis” is a ridiculously catchy instrumental tune that I could see the band leaving as is on a future release or building on and expanding, with or without lyrics. “Isolated Worlds” ends the record on a more mellow note than any of the previous tracks but that just goes to show that Mimic really does seem comfortable working at a variety of different tempos and creating different moods.

Being a demo EP, this is a pretty short release but one that left me wanting more. Caicedo and Xydias are both talented enough composers and players to make the tricky style of progressive thrash that Mimic trades in work and stand out amongst a ton of bands vying for your attention. Demos and bands come and go with regularity but after listening to Mimic’s only release, I’m hoping like Hell that they stick around because I’d love to hear what they could do with a full-length. New Orleans has always been known for musical innovation and if the spark that Mimic started on this release is any indication, the region could be in for a new blaze in the Louisiana sky.

Final verdict: 3.5/5

Photo at top: Cover art Mimic’s self-title demo EP.

Grab the EP and follow the band on Bandcamp, and follow them on Instagram as well.