Frente "Shape"
In around 1992, I heard Frente!’s (hereafter, Frente), cover of New Order’s masterpiece, “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Stripped down to singer Angie Hart’s vocals and guitarist Simon Austin’s light guitar arrangement, it dangled like a bauble amid the rest of the 120 Minutes slate driven, in no small part, by the incredibly photogenic Hart playing to the camera.
The cover was part of their name-making Marvin the Album that was used to spread Frente from being an Australian band to being a folky, fun band with international reach. In Summer 1996, after my first year at college where I’d been introduced to the Sundays, Frente returned with their second album: Shape which kept Hart’s angelic voice, but layered it into an ambitiously energetic, complex, Brian Wilson-esque psychedelia that, sadly, never got its due.
Let’ un-forget Frente’s Shape.
Background
As mentioned, Frente first came to my attention on MTV’s “120 Minutes” with their cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.”
They then followed up with “Labour of Love:”
That Melbournian “o” in “love” turns into an “a” as wide and flat as the Outback
From these two samples, it should be very clear that when Angie Hart (vocals) and Simon Austin (acoustic guitar) meet, something magical happens. Both of these tracks featured on Marvin the Album set the stage for Shape. Shape would feature a number of tracks that follow this magical formula of the angelic voice of Hart being beautifully accompanied by Austin’s deft, vocals-serving, mature guitar work. However, Shape saw Hart writing more songs, and it also demonstrated more complex arrangements of sonic, psychedelic layers against interesting percussion patterns. In this effort, what had come before was honored, but it was also expanded in ways that suggested Frente were going to keep evolving.
Call out tracks on Shape are:
- “Sit on My Hands”
- “Horrible”
- “Burning Girl”
- “Harm”
- “Air”
- “So Mad”
- “What’s Come Over Me”
The majority of these can be found hosted at Youtube (sadly neither Apple nor Spotify are streaming this album). Check your local thrift store or CD discounter for a copy.
Tracks
“Sit on My Hands”
Opening with a slow, plodding introduction with soundscape work that feels close to Björk’s Post or the Beatles “Day in the Life,” the Britpop/Fab Four influence casts a discernible shadow over the arrangement and psychedelia of this album. Whereas nylon-string guitars and Angie’s voice were sufficient in the previous album, Frente are clearly out to do something different in this album.
While the first two verses open up with a confessional, psychedelic-tinged tone (not a terrible advance), there’s a stunning break after the second verse in which thunderous emotions surge upward and break the idyll. In the rupture there’s even room for an electric guitar solito. The third verse leans heavily into psychedelia with vocal effects before returning to the more delicate confessional poetry. This yin-yang see-saw between these motifs sees the song to it completion.
“Horrible”
This song shows a certain writing and verbal dexterity that shows the tangential influence of hip-hop and, again, the Beatles. Driven by an electric bass line, Angie uses some punchy verbal dexterity to deliver a fairly conventional pop song opening.
In the second verse a guitar accompaniment comes in providing a rhythmic and tonal seesaw to the insistent bass (layer 1) and the punchy lyrical delivery (layer 2) and becomes the third layer.
Across an instrumental fill, we move to the second verse with all of the layers in place. It plays out as a solid triple-decker unit and then another instrumental fill. But at this fill, the psychedelia influence and multi-track studio creativity kick in and a beautiful twinning of Angie’s lyrical line becomes the fourth layer and she harmonizes with herself. This harmonization works up and down tonally as she begins to deliver a recursive, fractal lyrical line:
missing out what might have been the meaning of of the …(repeat)
“Goodbye Goodguy”
As the 90’s saw more and more female performers, we started to hear more and more songs about women breaking out from emotional codependence with poorly-matured men. This theme is found both in Catatonia’s and Elastica’s forgotten records. This particular song attacks the problem of breaking up with an emotionally possessive “Good Guy” who uses his “good guy” status as a weapon to be unassailable while demanding the inappropriate.
The writing here shines:
I feel like my feet have forgotten the way to your door
I have my hands and my words but what are they for
And you said you thought I was cute but I’m just a cutflower
And every second’s an hourWe scream, scream, that wasn’t the way that it was
I believe beauty was drowned in because
My mix and match memory has managed to make you a god
And everything else I forgotGoodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye goodguy
“Burning Girl”
Here we see a sonic return to Marvin the Album. We’re given lovely acoustic strumming, Hart’s angelic voice, with a slight extension of some more dramatic breaks, pauses, and strange sounds.
The song features a very dramatic break between versus and chorus by basically stopping the pleasant strumming of the versus and giving Hart’s voice the full stage for the chorus.
“Clue”
Frente’s music rarely edged towards the erotic, but this song seems close. It’s a woman in the flush of love, if not lust, if not lovesickness for a boy. Much like Justine’s complaints on Elastica, Hart here is frustrated that the thickheaded boy doesn’t catch her adoration:
I’ve seen you, perfectly designed
Don’t make me smile, don’t make me smile
All you thoughts are perfectly unkind
Don’t make me smileAll the stars in the sky
Just crossed your eyes
All the blood to your brain
Is in vain
Is in vain
“Harm”
This is just a stunningly beautiful track. It opens with Austin’s beautiful acoustic arpeggiation before Hart’s voice comes in calm, delicate, and delicate.
The lyrics are advisory and tender:
First time on earth
Going to have to tell you how to laugh
Smile like a star
A young disaster
You fist fight yourself like
Hart seems to be counseling an angry young man away from the aching path he’s choosing for himself: “you’ve come to harm.”
But in the last third, we see Frente exploring how they can subvert our expectations. A powerful minor-key melody surges in like black oil in the heart of a pastel watercolor. It eventually seizes the melody and consumes it and. In the final quarter of the runtime, a new sonic motif emerges.
Amid this motif, at the end, the lyrical weight becomes clear and we realize that the angry man, the sad man, was the young man chasing death at the needle-point of heroin:
You slip out of your lies
Flick night light diesAll of your cells yell surprise
Death had beautiful eyes
Death had beautiful eyesSoul in a spoon
Heart in a jar
That’s what you are
Soul in a spoon
You’re coming down soon
That’s what you are
“Air”
An amazing high point of sonic layers, a tribal/psychedelic vibe is paired with paradoxical lyrics and a sense of hush as big as their native Australian outback. Here’s a sample.
Unbeing dead
Isn’t being alive
The band experiments vocal layering by pairing the refrain with a muted bass mumble of the refrain in a way that makes it feel deeper, stranger, and more alien:
What’s wrong with the air
What’s wrong with the air
As the song moves to its finish, playing with the refrain expands the context of eeriness:
What’s wrong with the air
What’s wrong with the sky
What’s wrong with your eyes
What’s wrong with the air
What’s wrong with the sky
“Jungle”
A miss in my opinion. Nice flute work though. It’s pleasant enough, but it feels like it could have fit on Marvin the Album.
“So Mad”
With Angie Hart taking sole writing credit on this track, we see her tender song craftsmanship. It’s back to the winning formula of Hart + Austin’s guitar:
You’re sleeping, I’m not sleeping and there’s miles of night
I see something shining where there is no light
I just wanna bury it and throw away the weeds when they growWhat makes me so mad?
That scream to wake the birds
Is only my heart beating
What makes me so mad?
That’s a clever comparison of time duration expressed as distance (“miles of night”) and a poetic description around the tentativeness and vulnerability of wondering whether an argument will break a relationship’s foundation.
It’s a beautiful single.
“Safe From You”
It’s a sad song about domestic abuse. It’s conventional as far as a song goes, though.
“Destroyer”
Opening aggressive and energetically, the song seems to move into Hindu/Vedic cosmology referencing Shiva (“the destroyer”) and transmigration of the soul:
Fly into a guy into the one
World becomes a girl becomes the sun
“What’s Come Over Me”
Opening with a minor-key and electric power-chord pairing, this song feels like the dark twin to the opener, “Sit on my Hands.” While much of Marvin the Album and some songs on Shape rely on the acoustic+Hart magic, this feels like it’s about to destroy all that.
I know your whereabouts, unhappily
You know my weakness is my sympathy
The crust in your temperament, don’t wash with me
I scrub at the base of it with vaselineWhat’s come over me
I wonder whether this is the song where the girl who’s been yoked in the codependency described by “Goobye goodguy” breaks loose. As she finds her strength to purge something bad from life, she wonders what’s come over her, as surely her manipulative partner wonders as well.
The song leverages driving drums and bass and melodic electric guitar with tons of distortion to push almost squarely into a rock sound.
The song features, in its close, a Beatles White Album-esque “Hey-ha ho-ha everybody ho-ha” fractal refrain of “There’s no charge, hurry up and find out who you are” is accompanied by the fuzzy electric distortion and feedback from the lead guitar.
“Calmly”
The final song of the album closes gently with Hart and guitar one last time. The lyrics are impenetrable but evocative:
Here you come to calmly kill
The drum behind my eyes
Conclusion
The album has become staggeringly hard to find. I have the CD…but I don’t have any CD players anymore! I’ve been able to listen to the tracks again, but only through a hodgepodge of Youtube links. I’ve contacted Frente! management to see whether US streaming rights are coming. Amid various folk (Presidents of the United States of America) and folk-psychedelia of the era (Jane’s Addiction) and even folk-soul (Jamiroquai), Frente stood out as something different, something more delicate, and something more gentle. It’s a pity they never got their full due for the cleverness behind Shape in its time.