by Dash Lewis (@gardenerjams)
Based on their music, Meredith McHugh and Christian J. Best must really love puzzles. The core duo of Smoke Bellow, the Baltimore-via-Australia psych-pop band, revels in fitting together wildly disparate influences to create wholly new sounds. The individual elements are generally recognizable—highlife guitar figures, buzzing Casio chord vamps, melodic vocals gently kissed with reverb—but the songs in which they reside bend them into new shapes, clicking into physics-defying interlocking grooves. Their new record, Open for Business, is an excellent slab of jigsaw pop, collecting pieces they’ve cut out over the course of their discography and arranging them into something beautiful and unexpected.
Early Smoke Bellow recordings leaned heavily into the more billowing aspects of their sound. The towering drones on 2012’s Old haunts enveloped the listener while syncopated drum patterns threatened to topple over at any moment. The bent motorik grooves of 2014’s Blooming / Middling propelled forward as walls of guitar and organ built up and broke apart like a landscape rapidly moving through seasons.
After leaving Baltimore to move back to Australia, Smoke Bellow’s music softened, introducing more space between instruments and building grooves from more arrhythmic sources. Under the name Inner Light, the duo completed Pastoral Homage Vol. 1, a record full of quietly unfurling synth textures, off-kilter tape loops, and gently clicking drum machines. Taking cues from their newly electronic direction, Smoke Bellow issued ISOLATION 3000 in 2018, combining 70’s German synthesizer music and bassline-driven post-punk. ISOLATION ditched the vaporous clouds of sound in favor of a pastiche of counter melodies and overlapping vocal lines, flute arpeggios and saxophone stabs. It presented their love of repetition through a new lens, becoming the most hypnotic record of their career. Open for Business feels like both a culmination of their previously explored interests and a completely new era of Smoke Bellow’s exploration.
Having moved back to Baltimore, the band expanded into a three piece, enlisting drummer Emmanuel Nicolaidis (Oh Hang). Inspired even more heavily by post-punk, Business leans further into drums and bass as the foundational aspects of their songs, creating an initial groove that bends and distorts with each added element. The melodic basslines and circular drumming complete each other's sentences, one adding accents where the other opts for silence. The band plays with challenging time signatures to find more room for their various looping parts to fit, deepening their commitment to inducing trance states in the listener. It’s a dizzying, urgent record that conveys a meditative tranquility while thoroughly refusing to sit still.
“Hannan,” for example, is a perfect encapsulation of Smoke Bellow’s beefier sound. Beginning with a bouncing bassline guided by open hi hats, the band acts as a living loop pedal, slowly adding chiming guitar accents, a keyboard marimba figure, and a repeating vocal line. Eventually, the song breaks into a groove marked by tumbling toms, a Terry Riley-esque organ run, and saxophone punctuation. Once the groove firmly establishes itself, a drum machine cymbal finds the only spaces left, filling every moment with rhythm.
Later, the propulsive saxophone and kitchen sink percussion of “Fuck On” bend and twist around each other, creating a psychedelic dance jam that feels like Tom Tom Club’s “L’Elephant” and The Raincoats’ “Baby Song” were stripped for parts and thrown into the bed of a truck with no suspension. The three musicians are in top form, dropping in and out, adding and subtracting notes as the track hurtles to its abrupt close. It’s absolutely thrilling.
Beyond its sheer technical magnificence, Open for Business is a truly joyful listen. It’s thoroughly engaging, beautifully melodic, and very psychedelic—most importantly, it’s fun; there’s an undeniable sense of humor behind the strength of the songwriting. Smoke Bellow are clearly having a blast figuring out where to place each cowbell hit, how long to repeat a harmonized vocal line, or what background tape loop could add the most texture. It’s a painstakingly crafted record that knows full well the deep satisfaction felt upon completing a difficult puzzle.