Without a doubt Bomethius’ strongest and most mature effort to date, Sweet Nothings showcases the considerable songwriting talents of Dallas-based musician Jonathan Hodges more fully than anything else he’s produced.

In his earlier work, the capable multi-instrumentalist certainly impressed with his energy, zeal, and tender command of his instruments. Spry meditations on selfhood, love, hope, and purpose, his first two records exploited an array of styles to evoke the deepest doubts that attend the alienation and rage of youth. There were moving confessional ballads, contemptuous snarls at the world’s incoherence, musical parodies, and more. However, keen listeners knew far greater and more mature music would follow as Hodges continued to find and refine his sound. Well, here it is.

His third release as Bomethius, Sweet Nothings opens with its brief title track, 100 seconds of pleasantly harmonized, wordless persiflage that increasingly takes on a melancholy tone. On one hand, it’s the sound of finding happiness in sorrow. On the other, it’s a kind of exalted and manic indifference to the troubles of the world and one’s own soul. Its scatting melody becomes a refrain that recurs throughout the record, tying together some of its most poignant songs.

“Petrified Putrefaction” borrows this melody first as background vocals to a savage lay about abandoning people addicted to their own misery and pessimism. A soft, slow piano roams a catchy chord progression in “Our Visit,” an accusatory lament about facing flaws in loved ones, before the same manically indifferent sounds of the title track return in a longing, falsetto refrain. With its deliberate upright bass and bluesy electric guitar, “Coming of Age” crawls through a scornful complaint against God and time that dissolves in distortion and anger.

Like “Petrified Putrefaction,” “Peace of Mind” pays a kind of saintly homage to Elliott Smith with its double-tracked vocals and adroit guitar work. Fittingly, it’s also an attempt at self- exorcism as it narrates a potent battle with addictions to grief and self-pity. After the bridge, the oohs of the title track return to accompany the refrain (“I won’t go down with this ship / I’ve abandoned loose ends / And that’s how I’ll do it for now”), suggesting his professed triumph may be just another “sweet nothing” after all.

With barely three chords, “The Lumin, a Kempton Hotel” stands out — a minimalist, single- track, lo-fi heartbreaker that clocks in just shy of a minute and a half. As background noise recalls Sufjan Stevens’ iPhone recordings, the song laments the dissolution of the word “home” and its estrangement from the people and places who once defined it. Adapted from the name of the four-star hotel across the street from Hodges’ university campus, the title sneers at the idea of thoughtless elites wallowing in the amenity-laden joys of a manufactured anywhere while others suffer a permanent exile of the soul.

In the manner of a form poem, simple stinging lines repeat the word “home” in different senses, showing the crooked ways its meaning mutates and expires. In one line, the word “alone,” with the same long vowel, replaces it: “I’m a long way from my family / But my family’s not home / Home’s a long way from my family / And it’s home I long to be ... I’m alone when with my family / Just take me home.” Lacking his sense of place or belonging and unable to account for the changes that have sullied his memories, he dispenses with the facts and resorts to pleading for a thing he can’t even describe.

“My Clementine” is another nod to Elliott Smith, a smoldering attack on the frauds of memory that not only reinterprets the traditional folk song but also complements Smith’s own haunting variation of it. Instead of blithely lamenting the loss of a beloved, Bomethius here begs a tortured old flame to be his Clementine — meaning, a person “lost and gone forever,” drowned just the same, but this time in the River Styx of his mind. It’s a conflicted plea, however. As memories of the toxic affair feed his appetite for shame, he can’t help but hold on to her for just a bit longer.

A clean, whimsical guitar solo offsets a stormy piano in “Drown Me,” one of the few anchors amid the record’s manifold doubt and indifference. Narrating the tortuous path of rediscovering purpose after losing it, Bomethius insolently spurns the respectable but false satisfactions of life — journey, travel, success, wealth. In the song’s beautiful, yearning coda, he instead focuses on the irresolvable basics of existence — time, place, doubt, and damage — all in flux and answerable only by love: “We’re always leaving / Leaving home / And rolling away from our loaned stones / On this plain of never-ending bones / I want to stay with you.”

A stirring piano instrumental, “Home” sounds like the score to a familiar daydream: imagining idyllic family home videos from childhood while knowing they probably don’t exist. A soft, playful melody flits up and down the staff — like a dreamer ascending a staircase of memories in the mind — forever careful to avoid waking anything deeper and more disturbing from the vaults. While somewhat invested in maintaining the pleasant delusion, Bomethius refuses to resolve the song’s mounting tension. As he falters on the last stair, it’s clear he’s gone as far as he can unless he wants to ruin the dream. Instead of wrapping it up with a neat and pretty chord, he closes with hesitation and fragile dissonance — timid, barely audible, and yet hopeful. It shows how much he wants to love these things that trouble him, how much he wants to avoid anger and disappointment, and how difficult that struggle has been.

The record closes with “Nothing’s Sweet,” a tempestuous violin solo that pays tribute to Andrew Bird with its instrumentation as well as its title, which inverts the name of the album and the first track. (Bird bookended his 2009 masterwork Noble Beasts with “Oh No” and “On Ho!”) While it begins like a lullaby, the solo grows increasingly harsh as the melody makes several abortive attempts to soar out of the storm. They all fail to maintain flight and come crashing down, belying the doubts that even the radiant and pure “True Love Weights” couldn’t dispel.

Even so, Sweet Nothings closes, not with despair, but with balance. And while that balance may amount to nothing more than an exalted strain of indifference, it’s sweet anyway because it has found a way to ignore the pain through love. There’s no naïveté here, though. These songs clearly don’t suggest love solves everything. Nevertheless, despite its imperfections and shortcomings, it’s still the only source of true fulfillment in a life of loss and sorrow.