Whatever Has Never Been Cooler With J

This has been a great week to be a Dinosaur Jr fan in Toronto. The terrible tripedal lizard of indie rock just finished a 3-night residency at Lee’s Palace opening their tour in support of their 3rd break-up sex LP I Bet On Sky released last week. Rule of 3’s, get it?! Though my ears are ringing from last night’s banging finale show, I am most motivated to write about this fantastic new record.

God must have hated sharing cover space
 with an article about the Butthole Surfers 

Clear of ear from his stellar solo acoustic album last year, I Bet On Sky finds guitar hero J Mascis's key weapon set on stun and maybe even tickle, and not dead shred. While his signature sound is incendiary (Almost Famous!), some my all-time favourite J guitar performances are the kind he could probably peel off while brushing his teeth. For a six string god (thanks, Spin Magazine see right) his might lies in the ability to elevate the emotion of his songs and reveal much more of himself through his hands than in his lyrics. J's not a man known to waste (or even use) words & has long been reluctant to discuss his lyrical content. An original slacker, as a rock n roll persona, J Mascis is the mumbled ‘I guess so’ to Noel Gallagher's needy ‘d’yaknow what i mean?’ & his reanimated band is the perfect vehicle.

Artist Travis Millard beautifully
captures the mind-blowing Dinosaur Jr 

Throughout much of the superb I Bet On Sky, J is (in the Heathers spirit) fucking us gently with a chainsaw. And it feels great. For a band not famous for subtlety (ears still ringing), the band’s palette has widened here to include medium overdrive. Captured again by long-time J collaborator/producer/engineer John Agnello, this is the most comfortable sounding recording of Dinosaur Jr’s career. There's a glowy burn to songs like "Stick A Toe In", with its chopsticking piano and pinky volume swells leading to a brief bright burst of a solo outro, and the hypnotic but uptempo "Don't Pretend You Didn't Know", with its guiding synths and piano flourishes. The familiar thunderbolt is thankfully not entirely absent from Sky: the awesome tumbling thud of brick hit-house drummer Murf and Barlow's heavy handed bass playing seizes aptly named "Pierce The Morning Rain" and giddy wah wah shuffler "I Know It Oh So Well", with its loose stops and starts and cowbell groove is terrific. Even Lou Barlow's drop D personality can't  harshen the buzz of Sky: his punky "Rude" sounds like a Bakesale-era Sebadoh song played with a better band (twin guitar solo!) and the melodic metal of "Recognition" is too nimbly and expertly played to be considered sludgy. This new age dinosaur has gone all omnivore on us. They’ve expanded the power trio format from full-stomp to full-service most impressively. The true showstopper of this new set is the superb "Watch The Corners". All of the key Dinosaur elements old & new are on display - the easy melody sneaks up on you while the band revs up - Murf's drums and Lou's bass becoming more insistent through each repetition, setting up an acoustic break and one of J's best moments on the album - a soaring, cathartic solo. It’s dramatic stuff and it sweeps my leg every time. And I can drink to that.

Hello Cleveland, It's Me - Your Boss

Miller Lite was never cooler - GBV live in Cleveland!

There is something very easy and very natural about Ohio. I have always enjoyed Cleveland as a weekend destination; it's a great place to drink a beer, enjoy a band, take in a game and of course, it has the very worthwhile Rock Hall. 

Songwriting is something that has always come very easily and very naturally to son of Dayton, Ohio, Robert Pollard. He also finds time to drink a beer, enjoy his band, take in a game and of course, he is very worthy of a place in the Rock Hall.

So its with perfect symmetry that I ventured down to the 216 to catch the invigorated Guided By Voices, Ohio's all-time indie rock champs!

A quick, pre-gig scan of Cleveland's Grog Shop made it clear to this newbie that it was a place built for the rock and the resulting roll. All of the vital elements for full volume enjoyment are there. The stage faces a long bar (which featured 4 dollar, 24-ounce PBR) and is flanked by a fanboy friendly beer trough on one side so you can re-up without missing a note or full kick of your favourite band. The interior is classic, just what the exhibits in the local hall of fame aim to recreate: walls in the main room lined with show posters & murals tracing the history of the venue and walls in the sketchy bathroom sporting graffiti and the requisite 1000-to-1, band stickers-to-paper towels ratio. This is a perfect venue for beer showers and slobbery sing-alongs. 

It really is an incredible thing. A band that exhausted itself (and finally gave up) trying to live up to its own legend almost a decade ago, GBV is about to put out its 3rd album in a calendar year (The Bears For Lunch due in November) and there is no reason to expect that it won't be great. Un_fucking_real. This creative erection has lasted well beyond the 'call your doctor' range. 

FULL KICKS!

Having experienced the initial reunion tour of 2010 and more than a dozen shows of the varying lineups back in the day, I was curious to hear and feel how this year's material fit into the setlist with the first run classic era songs. Unlike almost every show ever, there was no get-to-the-hits vibe in the crowd (or onstage) at all. And the quieter ditties like "Doughnut For A Snowman" and "Chocolate Boy" stood up strong in the set alongside the louder, more raucous songs like short rockers "Hang Up and Try Again" and "Roll Of The Dice, Kick In The Head". All in all the new songs benefited from the live energy and the sold out, pretty much home crowd drank it all in, up and down. The encores (3 sets of 4 songs) were stellar as well, as they included the metal pop gem "Matter Eater Lad" and my personal fave "Unleashed! The Large-Hearted Boy" among the more obvious GBV classics. The final song of the night was most fittingly "Smothered in Hugs". We all felt it. 

Blissed Out in the Hissed Out

Bruce recorded Nebraska on one of these.
Damn - should we blame him for indie rock AND
 Eddie and the Cruisers! 

Music reviewers of a certain age, especially those without girlfriends, have long professed their love of the low-fi “genre” of the mid-90s. Though the low-fi label was attached to many of that decade’s prominent indie rock bands - Guided By Voices, Sebadoh, Pavement, Superchunk, all of the Elephant 6 weirdos, etc – it was really not a genre of music, rather a shared mix of ambition and economic reality. In the do-it-yourself spirit, unfunded bands recorded and released material with available means. They put out hissy, muddy 7" singles, vinyl albums and cassettes that captured the energy and heartstrings of the songs (along with feedback, punch-ins, count-ins, chair squeaks, etc). To the average listener, it sounded amateurish (it was by definition) and made no sense to their radio-trained ears. To record geeks, it was blissfully different and challenging and interesting and obscure. It was inclusive, underdog art and we couldn't get enough. These bands were home-fidelity operations, they did everything themselves - the artwork, the mail-outs, the pre-blog whisper campaigns - it was small i industry. And when many of them scored major label record deals and then mostly subsequently lost those big companies a ton of money, it was a harbinger of the end of the ruling labels and their grip on who gets to make a career of playing music. 

Dean Wells of The Capstan Shafts
and loud springs (not The Cure)

Most of those artists are either gone or reunion touring or running highly successful labels that chug along smartly in the brave new digital world. Dean Wells still flies the lo-fi flag. He has been putting out clever & catchy & noisy (just how we like it) blasts of psych power pop for more than ten years under the name The Capstan Shafts. Predominantly a one-man band, Wells’ first-crack recording aesthetic and happily reckless performances splash sticky cola goo on his short, sharp, British invasion styled tunes. Think Morrissey fronting Converse-era GBV. Like Bob Pollard, Well’s has a lyrical gift that cloaks the emotional themes in his songs with wordplay. It allows you to write a ton of songs and not have people say just get over her already! Amidst the clang & clatter are stellar songs with stellarest names: "Chandelier of Bad Ideas”, “She Makes Amazing Look Stupid” and the perfect “Sleepcure Theory Advancer”  from 2006’s hit-machine full length “Eurodice Proudhun”, which features the typically great lyric 'you must have a lead coat over your angel’s wings'. 2007’s “Environ Maiden” and the following year’s “Fixation Protocols” were consistently high quality in terms of song craft and lovingly shambolic quality in terms of sound craft (“She’s Kick People”, “Low Ceilings for Bedhoppers”  , “Her Novel ‘Canal Zone Poetry’” , “Squeals of Resignation” ).

What with all of the chronology? We’re on our way to the now. On 2010’s “Revelation Skirts”, the Shafts took a swing for the fences, or at least the warning tracks with a full-band, mid-fi effort that came up a few feet short. It hit the highs – the shimmering REM jangle of “Your Wasted is a Talent Here”, the winning chorus of RBI single “Quiet Wars” and the line drive “Heart Your Eat Out” are standouts – but overall, Well’s songs seemed slightly misrepresented and lacked the exciting, too-loose-to-lose style. Free from the ramshackles that demand the listener dig with their ears for the fancy hook and the killer lines, it just kinda seemed ordinary.

In 2011, Dean took to DIY web-label bandcamp to release the 14-song / 23-minute “Kind Empires”. From the ringing guitar line of opener “Degenerate Era Sweetheart”, it is clearly a return to extraordinary form. The sweet chaos and pop rock rush of the earlier Capstan Shafts material races through the songs, and Dean’s tightened guitar work transforms him into a one man Superchunk on songs like the smokin’ “Like Theme from Art House Floozy”, “Come Wilder” and the terrific “She’s Kind Empires” with its inverted "Turning Japanese" opening riff. He no longer plays like a guy trying to get kicked out of his own band.

Lionel Richie could have
these on the ceiling.

This August, Dean brought the crazy back and its awesome! He went back to bandcamp under the name loud springs to release two new 4-song EPs: “wheels to ceiling” and “trinity blast suite” and just last week came the third – “mean forever”. Dean described the distinction between the two band names via email thusly: “(loud springs) is played live with a drummer, then I add bass and a vocal. Everything is miked. Nothing digital or direct, so it’s a bit different … and all the songs are about roller derby ladies”. So there you have it. His fun with language continues with great song titles like “out with the win for trying crowd” and “full contact reiki”. The sound is live & raw & high energy. He should have piped in some audience screams for full Kiss Alive effect, cuz it feels like a fun party. And its shots, not pints: the longest 12 songs is 2:06 and gems abound, especially “lip impressions”, “full contact reiki” and the tasty “wheels to ceiling”, a promise for one of the aforementioned roller derby babes - ‘I’ll get you wheels to ceiling someday’. Go to bandcamp to check it out and pay what you can to keep it. This guy is a prolific songwriter with a keen knack for pure melody and noise. And I can drink to that.