Smug Brothers forge ahead with ‘Stuck on Beta’

Smug Brothers were deep into basic tracking for new album Stuck on Beta (Anyway Records) when the band members noticed something was off with the decades-old four-track to which they had been recording. 

“We’d had a hiccup with it a few years back where it ate a tape at the end of a session, and I didn’t realize then there was a real issue,” said singer/guitarist Kyle Melton, who is joined in the lo-fi Columbus power pop group by guitarist Ryan Shaffer, bassist Kyle Sowash, and drummer Don Thrasher. “And then Kyle [Sowash] went to put his bass on, and he was like, ‘Man, everything’s out of tune. What’s going on?’ And we realized then that the motor was dying.”

The revelation could have been a breaking point, leading the band to scrap the work it had done and perhaps abandon the album altogether. Instead, Melton did what has become common practice for him within Smug Brothers: He set aside any concerns and found an alternate way forward. In this case, by rerecording all of his guitar parts, a process he described as “taking one step backward to take two steps forward.”

In Smug Brothers’ history, Melton said there have been many similar potential inflection points, any one of which could have spelled the end of the band. Before Melton moved to Columbus, he said the musicians routinely ran into walls, once going a couple of years without a bass player prior to the addition of Sowash. Another time, the band members completed an album and then allowed it to fester on the shelf for more than two years because they lacked the resources, time and energy to push it into the public sphere.

“I still find it somewhat surprising that Smug Brothers exists, because I can point to so many dates and be like, ‘Nope, should have split there. No idea how we got through that,’” said Melton, who will join his bandmates in concert at Cafe Bourbon St. on Friday, July 18, playing alongside Paper Airplane, Old City, and Johnny Couch. “And getting through those different moments where the band could have split… I don’t know. Don once said, ‘I don’t know how, but you have this drive to keep things going.’ … And we’ve been fortunate in those moments that someone has shown up at the right time, or we made this connection that helped it along. Sometimes I’m surprised it’s able to keep going, but it does.”

It helps, of course, that songs tend to arrive to Melton as effortlessly as tap water to a faucet, creating a backlog to which the musicians are constantly playing catch-up. The bulk of the songs on Stuck on Beta, for example, were written three or four years ago, save for “Take It Out on Me,” which Melton penned in 1999 but wasn’t able to crack musically until more recently. “I used to do it as this slow, acoustic ditty, and it just didn’t go anywhere. And then finally one day it hit me: You know, what we should do is speed it up,” said Melton, who gravitated toward music instinctually as a child, recalling how at age 5 or 6 he would hop up on the family’s fireplace and strum a tennis racket like a guitar for anyone who would watch.

Revisiting “Take It Out on Me” decades after he wrote it, Melton allowed that different dimensions had developed within the song. “It hits home really hard these days, obviously, like, what’s the line? Find new ways to disagree. How does that not resonate in the modern era, you know?” he said. “But it’s still the same feeling I had 25 years ago, where it’s really difficult to get everybody aligned to a point where they’ll do well by one another.”

There are other lines on the album that appear to take a similarly jaundiced view of these social and political times. Witness the patient, pretty “Voltaire Basement,” on which Melton sings, “Every perfect world abandons the predecessor,” which reverberates as a call to wipe the slate clean of this mess and start over from scratch. But more generally, the songs play like sharply composed riddles, Melton’s cryptic, often-impressionistic lyrics standing in contrast to the comparatively direct, yet increasingly lush power pop tracks crafted by the bandmates. 

“Because of the more abstract lyrics I write, it gives a little more leeway to allow things to change over time,” Melton said. “And don’t get me wrong, I love good storytelling. I just don’t have that gift. That’s not what I’m lyrically drawn to, and I’m not particularly good at it, necessarily. So, having a good line like the one you mentioned – ‘Every perfect world abandons the predecessor’ – you can kind of hold that and turn it round and around and get all of these different reflections out of it. And I think that’s something we all enjoy with Smug Brothers material, where it has that capacity in different moments as time marches on to have new resonance. And I enjoy that, how a song can hit you in a new way, and how it can live and breathe in all these different moments.”