Two Inch Astronaut: Foulbrood

Surely it was only a matter of time before “influenced by Shudder to Think” finally became a legitimate way to describe a new band’s music. As The A.V. Club fondly recalled earlier this year, Craig Wedren & Co.’s “X-French Tee Shirt” might have been the most counterintuitive stutter step a band ever took into mainstream radio. This, in an era where pretty much every major label — including Epic, which Shudder to Think had just signed with — was throwing whatever it could find at the wall to see what stuck. Twenty years later, the idea of a song like “X-French Tee Shirt” being broadcast over corporate airwaves is actually more ludicrous, not less. In its day, however, stations like 107.7 The End actually gave it daytime spins, and for every thousand listeners who were surely lost by the song’s jolting left turns, there had to be at least a few youngsters out there whose understanding of what rock ‘n’ roll could be allowed to do was exponentially expanded.

The guys in Two Inch Astronaut appear to be a bit too young to clearly remember that mythical time, but it would be fair to imagine that guitarist/vocalist Sam Rosenberg found a copy of Shudder to Think’s Pony Express Record in the dollar bin of a DC-area record store at some point growing up. Two Inch Astronaut are based in Silver Spring, Maryland, a single stop on the Metro’s red line outside of the District border, and, fittingly, the specter of Dischord Records and the second half of one of the most heavily documented music scenes in recent history looms over Foulbrood. Assimilating Shudder to Think’s sense of unpredictable, twisting chord progressions is only part of it. Fans of the album will most likely first pick up on their sometimes more lurching take on the tense precision and crunch of Jawbox circa For Your Own Special Sweetheart. At other times, Foulbrood recalls lesser-known DC bands from that same time, such as Edsel and Smart Went Crazy.

Like Portland, Oregon, band Hausu, Two Inch Astronaut are adept at welding together select influences and techniques and repurposing them to their own ends. Foulbrood, though, is less the work of guys with master’s degrees in crate digging, and more the product of polishing a few key foundation stones and building up from there. “Part of Your Scene” and “Type Four”, which could easily elude notice if tucked into the track listing on My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents, start the record with two of its most direct appeals. Matt Gatwood’s drumming is both relentless yet restrained; tumbling through rhythm shifts, holding back on flourishes where rim and snare will do, but also not hesitant to ride the cymbals a bit when the mood calls for it.

Two Inch Astronaut are a trio that includes bassist Daniel Pouridas, but Rosenberg and Gatwood recorded Foulbrood as a duo, with Rosenberg taking on the bass parts in addition to his usual role. The reduced personnel doesn’t mean they are stretched thin, as Side A standouts “Cigarettes, Boys, and Movies” and “Dead White Boy” make clear, with tempos slowed down to open up the dynamic options, of which they employ as many as feasible. Unfolding and folding back up over seven minutes, “Dead White Boy” is a slow burning elegy for an untimely death in which no one is spared: “Dead white boy, he was in one of my classes / Long ago, went upside his head with a back brace / Tell me did you even like him that much?” Foulbrood‘s combined emotional and structural weight accumulates as the record goes on, but its ingenuity and spontaneity keeps the stone from gathering any moss.