Two Guns’ Waffle House in Louisiana music

PHOTO by JENNIE WARREN

It’s taken Two Guns one year to play one show, but only a month or so for the band to slide together—from a Fielding set at Long Beach’s Space where LA producer and multi-instrumentalist Chris Fudurich met cheerfully skeptical guitarist Kevin Poush, who had to go home and check his records to verify that this earnest new Fielding fan actually did produce that just-released Nada Surf Let Go LP, and then to a meeting at an LA bar post-Jan-2007-Fielding fall-down where Fudurich and Poush reacquainted and decided they would pursue a new band together. Poush had the Fielding engine in tow—bassist Aaron Bradford and drummer Adam Ferry, who all looked at each other when Fielding songwriter Eric Balmer admitted he was done and said, “So we’re still playing, right?”

“God bless the guy, he was honest,” says Poush. “He just didn’t want to do the band anymore—the idea to him of going to band practice was just not appealing. But to the three of us there was nothing better—hang out, drink beer, talk and play music—why would I want to quit doing that?” Fudurich—whose credits grew from experimenting in a friend’s OC studio to working with Matthew Sweet, Susanna Hoffs and during a calmer time Britney Spears—carried a remake/remodel songwriting philosophy that matched new bandmates ready for a revised creative process detached from the usual pop formula, which traded sophistication for landspeed and locked Two Guns away for months to record and snip and swap the best parts of everything they would write. With only their second show set for tomorrow, that work comes now just as a special rough demo—so rough it comes with hopeful smiley faces on the CDR—with five Two Guns songs in about four different styles, carving circumference around bedrock band inspirations like Elliot Smith, Wilco and Radiohead (OK Computer is the first record safe for all members to share without disagreement, says Poush) and keeping space within for carefully plotted pop that wears a McCartney/Rhodes comparison snugly. Like: “Locomotives” (love song about two Chunnel trains passing in the night) or the other skiffle-shuffle number “I Live Alone” (existential ennui manifested in residential specifics) and unlike the slightly grim “Heavy Heads,” with subzero keys by Fudurich and down lyrics about trickle-down media hyperbole, and unlike hollowed-out acoustic song “Strangers,” where Poush comes through in a voice already ragged for a guy who never fronted a band before and sings, “Here’s to big ships sinking/alcoholic drinking/what was I thinking?/Strangers are dangerous, you’ll see/ . . . /choose happiness over their family . . . ”

“I don’t know what I’d do all the time if I didn’t play music—I don’t even know what I’d do with my life,” he says now. “My best friend and I started a band when we were 19 and took his truck on tour—a dual-cab truck with six of us cruising the country—the best days! We think back now when we hear certain albums—every now and then, hear a certain song and think, ‘That’s it! That’s Waffle House in Louisiana music!’ I remember we went in and the waitress was obviously pregnant, and we asked her, ‘Where’s the smoking section?’ And I’ll never forget—she said, ‘Baby, this whole restaurant is a smoking section!’”

TWO GUNS WITH FORCEFIELD ON AND THE YEAR ZERO THE PROSPECTOR | 2400 E SEVENTH ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | MYSPACE.COM/THEPROSPECTORLONGBEACH | THURS 10PM | $5 | 21+

Tags: Long Beach, Music, the prospector, top-story, two guns, waffle house