Los Angeles – For the three members of the Colesville, Maryland post-hardcore outfit Two Inch Astronaut, the late 90s and early 00s never ended. With the release of their second full-length album Foulbrood on Exploding in Sound Records last week, the band continues to follow in the footsteps of their Beltway brethren, unleashing ten tracks of versatile post-hardcore. While the band mixes the track sequencing up with a variety of moods and tempos, almost every song sounds like it was culled from an old DeSoto or Dischord Records sampler. The comparisons to Faraquet, Dismemberment Plan and Jawbox are quite apt, but Two Inch Astronaut manages to carve out their own niche while remaining solidly defined as “DC post-hardcore.”
Though the band is now technically a three-piece, the core of the group is Sam Rosenberg and Matt Gatwood. The album was recorded by the duo, with Gatwood behind the drum kit and Rosenberg handling vocals, guitar and bass. Some of the songs were written with former bassist Daniel Pouridas; Rosenberg and Gatwood wrote the rest of the album. Pouridas amicably parted ways with the band after their debut album and has since been replaced with full-time bassist Andy Chervenak. That album, Bad Brother, features the track “Blood From a Loyal Hound,” which was included on a Best New Bands’ Mixtape.
There are times when hardcore-influenced bands in the vein of Two Inch Astronaut are lulled into a mid-tempo rut, and an album full of these sorts of tracks begins to sound monotonous and unmemorable. While there are a few forgettable moments towards the back end of Foulbrood, Rosenberg and Gatwood do an excellent job of mixing up the pace throughout the track listing. Details such as the riffing during the verses of “Cigarettes, Boys and Movies” and the prolonged, slowcore-inspired intro of “1,2, Talk” lend a unique personality to most of the songs.
Two Inch Astronaut’s greatest strength as songwriters is their knack for restraint within the verses of their tracks. The slow burning centerpiece of the album, “Dead White Boy,” utilizes this disciplined sense of restraint, as the band repeatedly holds back from bursting into the massive breakdown you know they have waiting in their back pocket. As each verse passes by, the song continues to build until the band can no longer hold back – the hook-filled pay-off that commences just after the four-minute mark is well worth the wait. The song then unexpectedly resets itself with an acoustic interlude before it reaches its hardest-hitting territory, emotionally expanding upon the stripped down dynamics of the early verses.
Less restraint is shown on the excellent title cut from Foulbrood, which bursts from the gate with staccato guitar riffing and unexpected vocal hooks, winding its way through myriad verses and bridges until it reaches a more straight-ahead refrain. At first, Rosenberg was not sure “Foulbrood” fit in well with the rest of the songs the band had written, and even pondered leaving it off entirely. In a press release from Exploding in Sound, the Two Inch Astronaut singer talks about changing his mind: “We initially thought it was a little too poppy for the record, but we decided it would be good to offset a lot of the slower stuff.”
The steps Two Inch Astronaut take on Foulbrood to refine and embolden their sound catapult them to the forefront of a growing wave of indie bands that are heavily influenced by the 90s. If the band can continue to have the same kind of growth on subsequent releases, they could soon be considered peers to the great Washington, DC-area bands they model their songs after.
Two Inch Astronaut will have a busy end of 2014 with a dozen shows left on their East Coast tour.
Matt Matasci
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