ALO, once and sometimes still known as Animal Liberation Orchestra, released their latest album Frames (Brushfire Records) today, April 4. The 10-song collection is either the sixth or the ninth album by the NorCal quartet, depending on whether one counts three late-90s records that can’t be found anywhere on the internet.
Frames is available now for purchase and streaming via all the usual avenues. CDs and a “liquid gold” vinyl edition can be ordered directly from ALO’s website (https://www.alomusic.com/).
ALO is Zach Gill (keyboards, accordion, ukulele, and vocals), Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz (guitar and vocals), Ezra Lipp (drums, vocals), and Steve Adams (bass, vocals). The foursome is known for exciting live performances that feature extended versions of their catchy jamband funk tunes.
In conversation a few weeks ago (near the beginning of ALO’s annual west coast “Tour D’Amour”), drummer Lipp said, “I'm still wrapping my head around the album. I listened to it yesterday, I was doing some harmony practice with it, and I was like, Oh, I really like this!”
I’ve had the opportunity to listen to the record a few times myself over the past month, and I concur with Lipp 100%. Oh, I really like this! Frames is a tight collection of well-crafted songs full of funk and fun, poignance and positivity. It’s guaranteed to provide a musical respite from a world awash with stress and strain.
The idea behind Frames, both as a title and a theme for the new album, emerged in studio. Here’s Adams’ take on it:
“The four of us have these very separate lives, physically in different places. But when we come together, we put all those pieces together, get on the same page and figure out what it means to be a band. You become a single entity from these four parts. We're kind of imagining these four different worlds as four different frames that intersect – and how closely can we make that intersection, so the thing becomes one life form?”
Gill echoed that sentiment. “We are connected to the patterns. We are the patterns, we're both within it and outside of it.”
Gill’s song “Blank Canvas,” kicks off Frames with a breezy yacht-rock ripple and lyrics that set a tone of liberation and release that reverberates throughout the album. To wit, he sings, “We can go anywhere we want, our story‘s not written yet.”
In a recent video posted on socials, Adams says “Blank Canvas,” “Represented a fresh start, like a new beginning, like anything's possible from this point.” Adams went on to say, “Zach, I'm sure, can speak more to the meaning of the lyrics.” I took that prompt as a directive to ask Gill to “speak more.” (Later, Gill posted his own video explaining a different aspect of the song’s progenesis):
“My dad has always been an artist. The house is filled with paintings. But he had never shown anyone. So, for his 80th birthday, we helped him put together a birthday party art show. It was impactful on a lot of different levels. Here's an 80-year-old man who jumped out of helicopters in Vietnam and made money in businesses and lost money in businesses and got involved in all sorts of different things. And here he is so nervous about sharing this art.
So, for the first time in my life, I've been sort of reframing myself as an ‘artist’ – which always felt pretentious. I always saw myself as a musician. But I've always drawn, I've always written songs, I've always written poetry. I've always made little movies, little sculptures. And once I realized that ‘this is art making,’ I just sort of accepted it. I found it pretty freeing. That's where the initial idea came for ‘Blank Canvas.’”
Next up is an Adams’ song, “Separated, Come Together,” a rocker from the get-go and one of the album’s best tracks. Though likely unintentional, this cut might remind some listeners of (and provide an optimistic answer to) The Offspring’s classic rock staple “Gotta Keep ‘Em Separated.”
When Adams shared his thoughts with me about “Separated, Come Together,” his thoughts harkened back to the theme of Frames. “With friendships, and your family, and touring, you're constantly coming back together and reuniting. [This song is about] wanting to appreciate the time you have together and know that it's not forever. It's a frame of mind.”
Lebowitz expanded on that “coming back together” aspect of ALO’s writing and collaborating process. “When we go to make an album, that's when we develop a narrative. New music always stretches us and pushes us in a little different direction. We're really open to the idea of collaborating on our ideas. That's kind of the unspoken rule. You throw out an idea and it doesn't stick and you're like, okay, cool. Or someone else throws out an idea.”
On Lebowitz’s “Space Between Frames” (which has an 80’s new wave’ish vibe, maybe a touch of Talking Heads in the mix), he might be singing about that experience of living with – and rising above – the tension that inevitably arises while making a record. Or the tension experienced when navigating any difficult relationship, or living in times of global turmoil, or facing any other type of challenge. There’s a line about being, “Lost in the time and all this confusion; there’s always a chance to make it feel right.” Never fear, music fans, ALO is here to help us forget our troubles for a while so we can rest, reset, and resume renewed.
Lebowitz underscored that sentiment – and by extension, the sentiment behind the entire album – when he told me that “Space Between Frames” is about, “How fast everything moves, and you're constantly making decisions, and then another one comes at you. And it's just fast, fast, fast, and fast. I find a lot of comfort in the space between those frames to figure the whole thing out. So you can move to the next one.”
The next one, at least on this record, is another Gill track. “Hey Hello (Tales of the Twist and Shout)” is the first song on Frames that bounces in the west coast party funk zone that best defines ALO’s sweet spot. When they play this one live and Gill commands the audience to move “A little to the left, a little to the right,” it’s bound to cue the Shapeshifters (that’s what ALO fans call themselves) to bop gleefully from one side to the other. “Hello” feels like a fitting partner to “Cowboys and Chorus Girls” from 2012’s Sounds Like This. (Hint to ALO: great live set segue opportunity here.)
Gill says this song emerged before he and his bandmates had settled on a leitmotif for the new record. “We were playing with the idea of making songs about occasions. Ezra wrote a song about Groundhog's Day, and I wrote a ‘second honeymoon’ song. I started thinking, ‘What if there was an introductory song?’ ‘Hey, Hello’ was left over from that original idea.”
That original idea about “occasions” eventually was dropped while ALO was in the recording studio, and a rough narrative about “frames” grew in its place. That’s a reflection of the way ALO interacts and collaborates synergistically and collaboratively, a topic each of the guys I the band mentioned when I talked with them:
Adams – “Going into the studio, you recalibrate; you share your thoughts. These frames come together.”
Lebowitz – “You throw out an idea and it doesn't stick and you're like, okay, cool. Everyone takes everyone's ideas very seriously. And sometimes it's just flowing.”
Gill – “Everybody's bringing in material and certain themes start to emerge, and no one has talked about that. It just sort of starts happening.”
Lipp – “[Being in the studio] felt flowing and magical and connected and energizing.”
Lipp also noted that some lyrics were repeated even though each songwriter came in with their tunes already in demo mode. “There's a line in ‘Rescue Our Demons’ that oddly enough starts with ‘High-heeled boots on a peckish frame.’ And Lebo has a line about demons in ‘Space Between Frames.’ You can almost do one of those connect-the-words things, like, Oh this song kind of shares something with this other one.”
“Rescue Our Demons” is a Lipp song with a modern alt-rock feel and a cruising beat. (I hear a touch of Death Cab for Cutie, a hint of Vampire Weekend.) Lipp’s lyricism is poignant and pretty – he’s the most consistently poetic and metaphorical writer of the quartet:
Leaning into the wind
Playing games in the water
Coming on like a drug
Too unsteady to falter
Lipp says “Demons” is, “A little escapist. It's positive energy. It's talking about not getting too serious about ourselves. And this is probably a good time for people to have music like that.”
There’s an eight-bar instrumental break near the end of “Demons,” a short guitar solo that will no doubt be expanded in ALO’s live performances. That’s true of many of the songs on Frames. Lebowitz, known as much for his tasty lead chops on his electrified acoustic guitar as he is for his set-ending “Lebo Leaps,” limits his solos to just a few bars on most of the cuts on Frames. (The longest song on the album is barely over five minutes long.) The guitar bit on “Demons” is classic Lebowitz, but it only hints at the live shred potential.
Oddly, “The End” comes at the album’s halfway point. As he does on many of these songs, Gill makes full use of his keyboard arsenal here to lay down the melody and build energy. (On “The End,” Gill uses a Rhodes, a Hammond B3, a piano, a Mellotron, and a Chompie sampler.) But it’s Adams’ Fender bass that pulls Gill’s song along with a powerful and dynamic 1-4-5 progression.
“Here comes that feeling again,” Gill sings in the refrain of this comfort-food funk song. Again, it’s a line that underscores the ALO ethos. As Gill told me, “One of the things that [our band] wants to do is not be part of all that other stuff but just be in its own set of interconnected frames.” (There’s that “frames” theme again!) Gill added that one of ALO’s goals is to provide listeners with, “A little bit of a different space than some of the other things that are going on, things that might be pretty intense.”
“Warmth of the Night” provides that space too, a space disconnected from the hubbub and turmoil of our busy, modern lives. It’s one of the album’s gems, though perhaps the one least likely to surface in ALO concert setlists. The chorus on this acoustic-ish love song begins with “We don’t need no fire” – but “Warmth” might be the most suitable-for-campfire song ALO has ever recorded.
Angelic harmonies by Fruition’s Jay Cobb Anderson, Kellen Asebroek and Mimi Naja elevate “Warmth” to a heavenly tier. Lebowitz says the way those harmonies came about is just another example of synchronicity in the making of Frames:
“I remember at one point I was like, what would Fruition do if they were here right now? Because that's the kind of vibe that we need for this song. [I reached out to them] and they were literally like, Oh my God, in two days we're getting together to start a run and we're all flying into San Francisco. It was perfect timing.”
Perfect timing indeed – which segues perfectly into the next tune. Lipp returns to the mic with a song about grace and acceptance on “You May Not Get It All,” a catchy, bouncy lilt laden with positivity. (In the chorus, the title words are followed by “But that’s all right.”) A neat little half-measure instrumental turnaround riff flows into the verses after each melodic musical interlude, a little detail but one of the most distinctive and creative musical phrases on Frames.
Next, ALO goes country on Adam’s “Simple Sentimental Dream.” Oh, what I would give to hear George Jones sing this one with heavy Texas drawl! “New love, old love, in between exciting.” That space-between-frames thing again.
Finally, Gill namechecks everything from “Starsky and Hutch” to hacky sacks in his sweet, nostalgic album closer “Friends.” “It actually started off as this other song called ‘Bros,’” Gill told me. “I took some of the verses from there – but ‘Bros’ was about two male friends, and I've got lots of female friends. So then I was like, I don't want us to have a song about friendship and have it just be men.” Well played, sir!
Shapeshifters know that love and friendship are one of ALO’s “secret weapons.” Gill, Lebowitz, and Adams met in elementary school, and Lipp was welcomed into their embrace with open arms when he took his spot on the ALO drum kit seven years ago. The band members are super-friendly with their devoted audience too. ALO shows are always a big love fest. Given that vibe, “Friends” will be a fan fave, no doubt.
Lebowitz gets his longest guitar solo on the record to bring “Friends” and Frames to a close. The album’s coda is a great reminder of the jamband power that ALO often keeps in check on studio recordings relative to its electrifying live shows.
With few exceptions, the songs on Frames were not test-driven on stage prior to ALO’s recording sessions last fall. Instead, each of the band members brought in a few songs that were new to everyone else. “They're all kind of like studio babies,” Adams says.
Now, with the album in the can and a leg of ALO’s tour about to start on the east coast, the band is continuing to hone live versions of the songs on Frames. Adams noted before ALO’s February west coast tour dates that, “There are songs that are going to be challenging and require a little more focused rehearsal to figure out how to create a live version.”
Lebowitz says this is a typical post-album experience: “Some of the early versions of songs, we’ll be kind of experimenting. Six months later, you're like, ‘Okay, these are the final parts of it.’ I'm always surprised that ones I think are going to take a while to figure out live just come right together.”
Lipp has a similar outlook. “I'm looking forward to hearing some of the things live that I think are right in the wheelhouse and hearing some of the things live that might go a little bit to a little bit of a new place.”
And finally, Gill sums up the ALO ethos behind the new music thing: “It's pretty exciting when the songs get to their get to the point where you could play them, where they play themselves. That's when new things start emerging from them.”
That’s the fun and challenge of being a jam band; you start with a “Blank Canvas,” and then you fill in the frame, daring to color outside the lines.
