Released on Anyway Records, “Start Making Sense” was featured as one of the best new albums on NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast, and received positive reviews in The Big Takeover and Popmatters. The Kyle Sowashes will play several shows in support of the album, including the Dec. 6 performance at Blind Bob’s, alongside Houseghost and Sam Stansfield.
Although Sowash says not much thought was put into the name — the phrase appears throughout the record, and thus became its epithet — it lands with surprising force, especially from someone craving coherence.
Upon first listen, this writer assumed the narrator was squabbling with a secondary party. Opening with “I’m Sorry, But We’ve Done Everything We Can Do At This Point,” then continuing into “It Doesn’t Really Matter What You Think” and “What Do You Want Me To Do About It?” feels like we’re overhearing a private conversation. But the more the album unfolds, the more it becomes clear the narrator isn’t yelling at someone; he’s yelling at everything. The frustration isn’t directed inward toward a single unfortunate listener, but outward toward a world stubbornly refusing to add up.
And so the concept/name/question/plea of “Start Making Sense” begins to well, make sense. What seems like one man shouting at another transforms into a voice for anyone who has ever stood on a porch and yelled at clouds. “Start Making Sense” becomes a 13-song moment of solidarity, delivered through a lens of nostalgic indie rock.
The Kyle Sowashes has been elevating life’s mundane details since 2005. On the debut album, the song “In The Mail” reframes sending out a fan-club membership as an odyssey to the post office. There’s a song about standing in line at a fast-food joint, indecisive on what to order. There’s one about being in love with Stevie Nicks.
From the beginning, the band’s guiding principle has been to amuse the boys in the band. Only recently has that ethos shifted.
“The subject matter has gotten a little more serious as I’ve gotten older,” Sowash said. “Just more fueled by cynicism and frustration, maybe throw a little anger in there, too. Up until the last couple albums, I wasn’t really as inspired by the things going on in our world today.”
He’s channeled politics, violence, and basic questions of human decency into the band’s recent songs. A lifetime of Weird Al fandom — plus a heavy dose of They Might Be Giants — helps keep the material buoyant. Run those sensibilities through a filter of Dinosaur Jr., Superchunk, and a couple of decades of indie rock tradition, and you get the peculiar flavor of The Kyle Sowashes.
Growing up in Dayton, Sowash listened to “The Future of Rock and Roll” on 97X Oxford. If he positioned his alarm clock radio just right — balanced on the edge of the dresser, tilted toward the window — he could barely catch the terrestrial signal. Through that imperfect connection he discovered the Ass Ponys, Chuck Cleaver and all sorts of “off the wall” music that showed him a sincere song could be written about something spontaneously combusting. The possibilities felt endless.
“A lot of that stuff is just engraved into my brain,” he said. “I listened to it so much when I was younger that it kind of works and molds your brain into being creative a certain way. [97X] was definitely part of my musical upbringing. It just all gets mashed together, like a KFC Famous Bowl. I’m one of those people that thinks it tastes pretty good.”
If we frame “Start Making Sense” as an LP-length argument, “Song For Joey Kramer” plays the part of “and another thing!” in the sequence. The track revolves around Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer and his often-underappreciated role in the band — a feeling Sowash says mirrors The Kyle Sowashes’ place in the wider music world.
“You get in your head about things. Sometimes I feel like we don’t really belong anywhere,” Sowash said. “We’ve been doing this thing for 20 years. I don’t think we would ever fit in a certain scene or anything like that. But we didn’t really have any aspirations. We just wanted to hang out with our friends and eat pizza, play shows and stuff.”
They learned early on to not take themselves too seriously — a mindset that fueled years of lighthearted songs and, perhaps, culminated in the pent-up exasperation of “Start Making Sense.”
Considering the sheer volume of grievances aired across the tracks like “I Don’t Like What I Am Hearing” and “I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore,” the instrumental finale “Poseidon’s Kiss” feels like the obvious thematic closer. Crackling feedback drifts in and out as a hazy surf guitar conjures a liminal sunset — the feeling of collapsing into a chair after 12 songs about a world that refuses to behave.
Sowash says there’s subliminal messaging hidden in “Poseidon’s Kiss,” a secret but innocent backmasked dialogue. I pulled the MP3 into my audio editor, reversed the clip and isolated the vocals. All I could make out was the phrase “it’s been a while,” the rest sounding like I was trapped underwater with the Greek god of the sea himself.
What does “it’s been a while” mean? Maybe Sowash told me there was a hidden message so I’d waste time decoding the impossible, just as he, on this record, wrestles with an impossible world. And when I inevitably failed, I’d whisper “start making sense” under my breath and realize I’d arrived at the point.
“I think as time goes on,” he said, “the problems of the world are on your brain a lot more. That’s all you can think about. Sometimes I gotta write a song about that.”
Brandon Berry covers the music and arts scene in Dayton and Southwest Ohio. Reach him at branberry100@gmail.com.
HOW TO GO
What: Houseghost / The Kyle Sowashes / Sam Stansfield
When: 8 p.m. Dec. 6
Where: Blind Bob’s, 420 E. 5th St., Dayton
Cost: $10
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