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U-Melt, "Perfect World"

Steamboat Springs — All-American rocker Bruce Springsteen showed progressive rocker Zac Lasher the way.

Lasher, the frontman for Brooklyn-based progressive rock band U-Melt, grew up in New Jersey, and Springsteen’s “Born to Run” was his favorite record. The last song on “Born to Run,” a track called “Jungleland,” is 9 1/2 minutes long. It was the first time Lasher heard a song that had a beginning, a middle and an end, he said.

“From an early age, I kind of got a nontraditional song form in my brain,” Lasher said. That break with tradition has been stuck in Lasher’s head ever since.

U-Melt songs can tend to be long. There is a lot of composed music involved, and vocal harmonies happen often. Parts of U-Melt’s everything-goes range of musical styles come from Lasher listening to bands such as Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and parts come from his college theater classes.

“A lot of our songs are kind of like little movies, I kind of look at them like that,” Lasher said. “Whereas your typical three-minute song is sort of a snapshot, our songs are kind of like short films — they tend to have an arc to them, so you’re not really left off at the same pace where you started. The songs are often a bit of a journey with kind of a dramatic build to them, almost.”

U-Melt plays a free end-of-season show at 10 p.m. Sunday at Old Town Pub.

The band is on a nationwide tour in support of its recently released third studio album, “Perfect World.” Lasher looks at “Perfect World” as the product his band has been working toward for 6 1/2 years. For the conceptual album, Lasher started thinking about the limits of human perception, he said.

“The record is sort of about that idea, how there’s just so much more to our reality than we’re really able to understand, and it doesn’t really propose any answers as to what that is, but I think it asks those questions,” Lasher said.

U-Melt is Lasher on keyboards, Adam Bendy on bass, George Miller on drums and Kevin Griffin on guitar.