Smoking Expats

Walking away from their respective roles with Talons and The Rational Academy, Christian Best and Meredith McHugh have partnered up to form Smoke Bellow, a droning, mantric outfit making waves within the thriving DIY scene of Baltimore. McHugh is only 12 hours off a trans-Pacific flight but Time Off doesn't hesitate to dive in the deep end straight away, prodding the former Brisbane resident for information about the working partnership at the belly of the band and the feelings and emotions their expansive songs are trying to convey. “The songs are a weird evolution of Christian and I because we were both playing together for about a year until we got to something that we were both really happy with,” McHugh explains. “We both came from fairly different musical backgrounds but we both share a lot of the same interests in music. But then, as we're playing as a two-piece for the most part, we had to figure out how to get a full sound out of just two people.

“They're journey songs I guess, which is really weird and clichéd, but I don't know what we're trying to get out of people. It's not a conscious thing, the songs just happen because we write in an organic way but we don't plan things too much. Some songs have turned out quite sad and others are really uplifting, but we didn't play them to be that way. I don't think either of us really write with a specific story in mind or a feeling associated. You're writing as a two-person unit so you're both coming at it from a different perspective. It's not like one person brings in a song, like with The Rational Academy one person would bring in an idea and then we'd write around that. We write at the same time so it's hard to put anything specific in, in an individual sense.”

McHugh and Best only met a few months before they decamped to America's East Coast, and although they were sure they wanted to write music together, they weren't certain that the band would actually work. It wasn't until they created a soundtrack for an exhibition at Brisbane's Nine Lives that they both realised Smoke Bellow had a future. Now, the group operate as a three-piece with the addition of percussionist Alex Haworth, and have become a vital part of the inspired Baltimore underground music scene.

“One of the amazing things about Baltimore is that there are all these cheap warehouse spaces,” McHugh expands. “The city has a lot of abandoned buildings, so artists and musicians move into these places. We have a really cheap rehearsal space that we share with a few bands – it's quite beautiful. It looks out over this coloured bridge in central Baltimore. We mostly write there just because that's where most of our gear is stored, but I guess one thing about the songs is I don't think we would have written anything like we have had we not been in Baltimore – it feels how we feel when we're in the city. And just the music that comes out of the city is challenging and exciting for us to be involved in; it pushes you to write in a different way that we maybe couldn't have done in Australia. There's something about the city that's just a bit odd so it produces this weird art and music that has less boundaries in how people expect you to create and play. And it's very supportive as well.”

Smoke Below will be playing the following shows:

Sunday 4 November - Gasometer, Melbourne VIC
Friday 9 November - Midian, Sydney NSW