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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: The ‘Fronts’ “Mamo Waves”

“I am not guilty of insanity/My brain was taken in a brain robbery.” So sings one of the pseudonymous members of the ‘Fronts (pay attention to that apostrophe) on “Mowin’ The Lawn,” which is one of six tracks on Mamo Waves. Sometimes in life, you gotta deal with what’s real, but you can overdose on that stuff. The right music can be an effective antidote, and if you find yourself in need, this LP can cure what ails you.

Mamo Waves compiles previously unreleased tracks by a band that was known during its existence as the Whitefronts. Named after a local grocery chain, this variably sized ensemble existed between 1982 (when it was founded by some UC Santa Barbara students) and 1987 (when it disbanded in San Francisco). The band members’ influences were legion, or at least as numerous as the collective collections of a crew of college-aged people living in good used-record markets in the 1980s, but some stand out. They had a fondness for Caribbean rhythms, guitar sounds that precede the British underground or come after punk, and horns that took permission from free jazz but abjured its urgency. There are drifting passages, as on “The Earth’s Mandrill,” where the guitar interplay sounds like it fell off of the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282’s truck. But if you compare timelines, it’s much more like that the Fellers were doing the lifting.

That’s not an idle reference: Mamo Waves has been released by the same label that’s returned the TFUL282 discography to vinyl bins in the last couple years. Bulbous Monocle’s mission is not simply to reissue one band, but to advocate for the ongoing cultural relevance of a West Coast scene that transcended labels but was united in its embrace of absurdity. Take the aforementioned “Mowin’ The Lawn.” Over the course of 14 and a half minutes, one of the band’s members ponders mobility, self-esteem and home cooking while the guitars carry on a loosely structured debate over rhythms that lurch between calypso and psychedelic rock and another member waxes Yoko-esque. If you’re looking for meaning here, you’re missing the point. Better to just go with the flow and join the party. If, at the end of the episode, you aren’t sure what happened, you’ve done it right. [Bulbous Monocle]

—Bill Meyer