Their Facebook bio describes The Mowgli’s as “5 childhood friends from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, augmented by 3 mid-western transplants” who are“a quintessential California band.” Now, I’m no Californian but my roommate definitely is and I have been introduced to my fair share of Californian music over the past 4 months so I feel confident that I can support The Mowgli’s’Facebook description. In fact, I’d say this band is just all around quintessential – not just as a band from Cali. Love’s Not Dead is the band’s first EP and is I think a great way to compose a first EP in that each song brings a different element of the band’s sound to the table.
“San Francisco”, the first track on Love’s Not Dead is a fantastic track with probably my favorite lyric of the EP “I lost my head in San Francisco waiting for the fog to roll out, but I found it in a rain cloud, it was smiling down.” While singing about love, this song has uplifting vocals and a campy musicality that sounds like Mumford & Sons meets Walk The Moon with a touch of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. That sort of sound is still present in the track #2 “The Great Divide”, especially in the way the vocals sound like many men singing rather than just one lead singer. Separating itself from “San Francisco” however, “The Great Divide” has more of an indie rock/blues sound that makes one fall even more in love with the EP.
Love’s Not Dead’s third track “Time” stands out from the EP’s first two tracks by having a singular vocalist whose voice has the tone and passion that, paired with an acoustic guitar, makes for a very folksy sounding song. It’s really an inspiring song with lines like “Just be who you want to be. Don’t you want to see how good life can be? Let’s make a harmony and life will sing”. With the next track, “Slowly, Slowly”, however, the EP picks up again with a more indie rock song that for some reason reminds me of a convertible on a cliff-side highway over a coast colored by sunset. The lyrics are soft, though interrupted every now and then by a dramatic pick up or two and the overall music is interestingly weird in that there’s the base melody but every now and then harder drums or lighter acoustic sounds come in. The final song of the EP is “Carry Your Will” and that does a really fantastic job of telling a tale of falling down into a place where there is no light, but picking up and carrying on. The song’s hook “If you carry my will I will carry your will” is song in chorus and gives a strangely ethereal mood to the whole thing that keeps leaving me singing it hours after listening to it.
I’m eternally happy that the brilliance that is The Mowgli’s was pointed out to me because honestly the world needs to know this music. The Mowgli’s are little known but wildly popular amongst those in the California music scene and that only makes me want to hitchhike across the country to the west coast so I could see them live. For 21+ fans in LA, The Mowgli’s will be playing every Monday night of February at The Satellite for FREE so get your asses down there.