Smug Brothers learns to embrace the good times with ‘Pinhole to Vortex’

Smug Brothers singer and songwriter Kyle Melton likes to preserve a degree of mystery in his lyrics, at times leaning into more cryptic language as a means to abstract, warp, or hide the original inspirations.

Witness “Blitz Meridian,” off the band’s recently released album Pinhole to Vortex, which includes lines Melton said he wrote specifically about people he crossed paths with while navigating the Dayton music scene years ago, but which played like a commentary on this particular political moment when the album surfaced via Anyway Records in September.

“There’s a little bit of comfort and distance for me as a writer to not give the game away. … So, I knew what I was talking about, but you’re right, as things have unfolded, because it has these abstractions, [lines like] ‘nobody’s taking out the trash’ or ‘old styles have gone out of style/but they’ll be back again in just a little while,’ there are these new layers,” said Melton, who will join guitarist Ryan Shaffer, bassist Kyle Sowash, and drummer Don Thrasher in concert when Smug Brothers headline Rambling House on Saturday, Nov. 14, supported by Manager, Eternally Psyched, and Citizen Dorian S. “And that’s kind of the fun of it to me. I can have this idea of what I’m talking about, but because I’m not being so specific, it can take on all these different meanings.”

Within Pinhole to Vortex, however, there are certain themes to which Melton returns, primarily the realities of aging, which surfaces in songs such as “Speeding by the Way Things Used to Look” (“The more you know, the less it helps”) and the album-closing “Drive Open in the Delicate Streams.”

“I mean, that’s creeping in because I’m over 50 now, and the last time I checked I was 25, and I think you’d be silly to not have that awareness,” said Melton, who over the course of the record appears to reflect on lessons learned (or not) and what might await at the end (“Who will show up for the crescendo?” he asks on “Kind Enough to Share the Drop”). “And I think that reality really hit me toward my late 40s … where it was like, oh yeah, your days are in fact numbered, so you better start enjoying them. … Even with Smug Brothers, you know, we’ve been a band this long, but we’re not going to be around forever, and we know that. So we better make it count. We better have some fun.”

This idea resonated strongest for the musician in the recording of “Drive Open in the Delicate Streams,” a track he originally wrote as a much younger man, and which took on new layers of meaning in putting it to tape more than two decades later. “For soon, you’ll be older,” Melton sings, his current existence serving as proof of this concept.

Melton said he wrote the song in the early 2000s for his previous band, Areacode, but never recorded a proper version. Something about the track continued to tug at him, though, and over the years he would return to it on occasion, finally seeing in this new record a place where it fit comfortably.

“And, yeah, delivering a line [‘for soon you’ll be older’] hit me pretty hard,” said Melton, who had that younger version of himself in mind as he tracked his vocals. “And to have those two different points on the timeline sort of present at the same time, it was heavy, man.”

Not that the album bears any of this weight, with Melton and Co. veering between freeweling, jangly garage-pop jams (“Kind Enough to Share the Drop”) and dreamier turns such as “From Crack to Shatter,” which builds around the kind of effortlessly shambolic melody Smug Brothers has perfected in recent years.  

Elsewhere, the horn-fueled “Picasso Waltzes” unfolds as a musical version of the “This Is Fine” meme (“It’s fine. We’re all fine,” Melton sings with tongue planted firmly in cheek), while “Speeding by the Way Things Used to Look” addresses the reality that the deeper one gets into life, the more confounding it becomes. At least ideally.

“There’s a point when you’re young and you think you have it all figured out, and then you keep going and you realize, yeah, you don’t,” Melton said, and laughed. “And not everyone gets there. I mean, we’ve all seen more than enough people who are the flipside of that coin, and who have that moment where they think they have it all figured out and then they stick to it. … So, I do think that takes a certain degree of humility to keep going and realize there’s more to it. And that’s good. That’s the adventure.”