The Mumbles Say It Loud and Clear : Don’t Try to Pigeonhole These O.C. Rockers, Who Explore and Test Musical Boundaries

The men of Mumbles are not so pretentious or corny that they would claim to be on a mission to go where no band has gone before.

But the obscure Orange County rock group with the funny name (inspired not by Michael Stipe’s elocution or Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Dick Tracy,” but by a postcard one member received from a Welsh seaside town called The Mumbles) is set on exploring ever-widening expanses of musical space.

Actually, when Mumbles plays a free concert Sunday afternoon at the Newport Center Library, it may well be going where no rock band has gone before, at least not with amps and instruments and an invitation to plug them in where the watchword is usually “Quiet, please.”

Exploration was the founding principle when the band started out under its former name of Drowning Pool, according to bassist Brett Smith, a tall, dark-haired man with an intense, straightforward manner.

“Just being hungry for different sources and influences, not just (settling for) the run of the mill,” Smith said, trying to describe the method that has prompted Mumbles to delve into rhythms and harmonies from India, Indonesia and Africa, in addition to brooding British post-punk rock, Celtic marches, cabaret music and American blues, folk and funk-rap influences. “Deliberately seeking things that would really sing to us. We still do it. We’re still seeking.”

“When we write anything, it ends up being quirky,” added guitarist Adam Elesh, who founded Drowning Pool with Smith in 1984. “We like the twists in the music. Anything that’s down pat is too obvious. We like to trick ourselves and keep ourselves interested.”

There was an interesting twist in Elesh’s upbringing. He was born in Anaheim, where his father is an anesthesiologist, but his English mother sent him at age 8 to Harrow, an upper-crust British boarding school whose alumni list includes Lord Byron and Winston Churchill. Elesh’s 10 years there shaped his cultivated, amiably urbane bearing, and left him with a penchant for referring to the other Mumbles--Smith, drummer Jon Thomas and singer Kelly Ray--as “the lads.” The band members are in their mid- to late 20s.

So far, Mumbles’ explorations have been confined largely to the rented back-yard garage in Costa Mesa that the band has converted into a recording and rehearsal studio, complete with carpeting, egg cartons for soundproofing, and posters of such influences as Siouxsie Sioux, New Order and Peter Gabriel. Drowning Pool, which lasted from 1984 to 1989, issued several albums on tiny, underground labels that didn’t do much to drag the band’s profile out of the deep end. As Mumbles, it has yet to surface publicly with any recordings.

But the demo recordings that Mumbles has been laying down in its garage are something special. At a time when too many alternative-rock bands are content to cultivate a single, identifying (and, more often than not, overtly borrowed) sound and burrow into it like so many hibernating groundhogs, Mumbles’ double-album-length demo tape realizes the band’s exploratory goal.

The tape, dubbed “Mumbles” and due for release next month on Viva Records, an Italian label that may ship some copies here for import sale, is outstanding not only for its stylistic scope (at various times it can recall everyone from Led Zeppelin to the Cocteau Twins, from Pink Floyd to Leo Kottke, from the Who to an electrified, furiously driving bluegrass band), but for its depth and range of feeling. Among the band’s virtues are its gift for musical architecture (Mumbles excels at creating a sense of sweep and complexity out of the simplest riffs and rhythm patterns), its thoughtfulness (Elesh, the main songwriter, has drawn on such lofty sources as Sir James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” and James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for inspiration--and pulled it off without pretention in stirring instrumental pieces that evoke the literary works’ core themes), and its ability to rock authoritatively or create such lovely, graceful moments as the closing piece, “Brownleaf,” an elegy that conveys deep sorrow borne with noble dignity. Elesh actually does himself a disservice in describing Mumbles’ songs as “quirky,” because their twists and turns usually are purposeful devices, not mere oddities and attention grabbers.

There is also humor, along with that purposefulness. “Down By the Sea,” a vaudevillian jaunt about a beachside vacation spot, sounds like a breezy cousin to Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” and the Kinks’ “End of the Season.” On “Hollywood,” Elesh’s circling, swarming, guitar figures slice satirically, turning the song into a jaundiced corollary to the Doors’ romanticized cityscape in “L.A. Woman.”

Much of the album’s strongest material is instrumental, with Smith’s electronically treated Chapman stick broadening the band’s array of sounds. But Ray’s singing is also a strength, clear and sturdy, in its bluesier moments recalling Paul Rodgers of Free, Bad Company and Firm fame. The lyrics, mostly carrying abstract images rather than narrative lines, tend to be secondary to the music.

Mumbles’ development began in 1983. As Elesh tells it, Smith was reluctant at first to take up his offer to join a band as fill-in bassist.

“Brett wasn’t too keen on it to begin with, but I guess we’re fated to suffer together,” he said with gentle irony. “It’s been like that ever since.”

At the time, Smith was more interested in doing something with his economics degree from San Diego State (where he and Elesh had met) than with his bass. “I hadn’t thought of playing rock again. I was planning a career using my degree,” he said. “I agreed to fill his gigs for him, and the music just grew on me, and I knew I had to continue it.”

When Drowning Pool’s singer left in 1988, Smith, Elesh and Thomas made an all-instrumental album as a farewell to the old name, then decided to hang together with a new name and a new approach.

The idea is to make Mumbles more direct and accessible than Drowning Pool, while still going for the unusual.

“We’re trying to include people in what we’re doing more, be more approachable,” Elesh said. “We do what we like, but we don’t try to take it too far out there into the avant-garde.”

Based on Mumbles’ demo tapes, it is hard to imagine an unsigned band more deserving of recognition. But Mumbles is a hard sell in these days of narrow formatting and record companies leery of trying to promote bands that can’t be described and categorized in a word or two. Elesh said that approaches to major labels have proven fruitless, and that the band will now concentrate on trying to interest an independent label that would have the resources to back touring and give an album more reliable distribution than Drowning Pool’s releases received.

For now, the band’s attitude is chastened, but also hopeful.

“We’re kind of naively hoping someone will approach us” and help the band navigate its way to a niche in the music business, Elesh said. For now, the members’ day jobs in construction, interior decorating and office supplies sales are imperative.

Smith is well aware that a band of Mumbles’ breadth isn’t what music marketers are looking for these days.

“They’re into packaging and pigeonholing. But it’ll come around,” he said, brightening. “The music business can’t go on forever like this.”

Then he thought again. “Famous last words.”

Mumbles plays Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the Newport Center Library, 856 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Admission is free. Information: (714) 644-3191.