The Mowgli’s spin mid-20s angst into pure pop sunshine
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| The Mowgli's |
By Scott McLennan
Special to The Journal
Published: 30 June 2013 12:01 AM
It’s not surprising when Katie Jayne Earl tells you she has “Help Me, Rhonda” playing in the background while handling a phone interview about her band, the Mowgli’s. After all, the dreamy pop of the Beach Boys is but one of the many feel-good ingredients the Mowgli’s stirred into the band’s national debut “Waiting for the Dawn.”
“Our parents passed down their music to us,” Earl says of the eight friends who formed the Mowgli’s a few years back, conspicuously copping the retro groovieness of their Southern California surroundings.
Oddly enough, the song that garnered the Mowgli’s a hit looks to another part of the Golden State. “San Francisco” is an unironic slice of pop sunshine that begins with the line “I’ve been in love with love,” and uses the “L” word enough times to make even Paul McCartney blush.
“We were just sitting around hippie-ing out,” Earl says of the Mowgli’s decision to scrape the angst off its alt-rock. Last year the band put out a record with many of the songs that ended up on “Waiting for the Dawn,” among them the inspirational “Carry Your Will” (“Let your faith guide your fate”) and optimistic “The Great Divide” (“And when the sun brings in the morning, I know today will be better than the last”). Even the breakup-inspired “Love is Easy” manages to produce a balm.
Yet these are not songs bubbling up through syrup, as many are actually born out of anxiety and fear. Earl and her band mates are in their 20s, and she says they have a lot of friends who feel like the traditional ways of getting ahead and growing independent are broken. The ideal of going to college, finding a job, and getting a place to live has turned into the reality of incurring a mountain of debt, working at some place just to get by, and returning to a bedroom at parents’ homes.
“We’re all just going through the emotional turmoil most people go through in their mid-20s,” Earl says. “We combat that with music and hopefully we make the listener feel less alone.”
The soaring vocal harmonies the Mowgli’s generate certainly are the equivalent of a sonic group hug.
The layers of keys and guitars likewise conjure the warmth of chamber pop even as the band likes to keep its infectious energy fairly unbridled.
But not everything is honeyed on “Waiting for the Dawn.” “Time” is a bit of sparse folk strumming laced with frustrations, most expressed as bluntly as “I don’t like time, time is making me old.”
“We’re not worried about sounding hip, or cool, or abstract,” Earl says of her band’s earnestness.
But the Mowgli’s message is getting through. The band has been on a few buzzworthy tours already and knows it has a busy fall with a run of shows with fellow up-and-comers Walk the Moon. The promotional trek for the recently released “Waiting for the Dawn” brings the Mowgli’s (so named after the main character in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”) to the free concert series at Waterplace Park in Providence on Friday, July 5.
“Our intention was not to sound vintage or classic,” Earl says. “We just wrote songs to make people happy.”
The Mowgli’s will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 5, at Waterplace Park, Memorial Boulevard and Exchange Street, Providence.
Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1
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