In proud pop-music fashion, Zoo Front’s “Off The Rails” — off its first EP of 2021, I Need Time — marries happy music with contemplative lyrics, as sunny guitars and a hip-swaying beat are used to convey a message very much of the minute.
“Heartbreak decisions are coming down the line / It’s the way of the world these days for the suits to rob you blind,” Nancy Tief sings. “Engines keep turning We’re widgets in a wheel / Pulling more than our weight each day just to close another deal.” She’s singing about life before the pandemic started — without a sense of wanting to return to it. Instead, she sings about looking for something else: “I need to look at the water, the sky and the trees / It’s the only way to lose the chaos of the day and just let me be.”
That the song is so timely is no coincidence, as it was written during the Covid-19 pandemic, already with an eye toward the future. That kind of longer-term thinking isn’t surprising for this veteran band. The New Haven-based Zoo Front — Tief, Ed Ekendu, Ju Dee Luna, and Lisa Tonner — has played at venues across the state for years; before the pandemic began, its last live show in the area was at Best Video in Hamden.
With the Covid-19-related shutdowns, the band became a quiet model (among many in New Haven’s music scene) for how to keep music going. In April 2020, the band released its eighth full-length album, We Float North, which the band’s members had finished recording before the pandemic began. To celebrate the album’s release, the band also released a video, made during the shutdown, which featured bandmates playing in isolation on the banks of the Connecticut River. Circumstances that may have felt lonely were instead used to contributed to the song’s relaxing vibe.
As the weather warmed up, Zoo Front began getting together for regular outdoor rehearsals — occasionally setting up at the mouth of a well-ventilated garage if it looked like rain. The results were, first, that the band was ready to do an outdoor show at the Watertown Farmer’s Market in August. “So nice to be back out entertaining people. Masks and distancing of course, but all in all a great show,” the band wrote on social media. “The months of quarantine have been fruitful and today we debuted nine new songs. Still some polishing to do, but they sounded good. The oldies fell right into line.”
When the weather got too cold to gather outside anymore, the band turned to recording some of the new songs they’d written. Ekendu has a studio in his house. Two of the band members, who live close by, recorded separately while Ekendu ran the recording session from another room. Another band member lives farther away and recorded her parts herself. She then sent her parts to Ekendu through Dropbox. Thus I Need Time could be pieced together without any band members having to share indoor space.
The album lost no energy for being recorded in the way that it was. “No Shame in Askin’” finds the band strutting to an angular guitar riff before Ekendu comes in with a darkly playful set of lyrics that references film noir moods even as it creates one for itself. “Where’d you put that gun you held on me before? Maybe in the desk over there in the upper right hand drawer? What in the world made you ever think you’d need it for me? Like some ingénue fatale in a black and white movie you saw last night on TV?” Ekendu sings, before hitting the chorus: “There’s no shame in asking if you’d like to dance.” “Amber Photo” puts the band in a more contemplative mood, driven by a bluesy shuffle. “No Denial,” meanwhile, is a live recording from a show Zoo Front did at Compassionfest in Hamden in 2017.
The four songs are more than enough to round out this EP, which finds the band striding into 2021 ready to keep making music. After all, six new songs remain to perhaps be recorded, with more surely on the way. As the city looks forward to the spring — and perhaps the opening of outdoor spaces to live music in front of small, socially distanced audiences — Zoo Front is ready to make us cheer and think.