Pumping up the volume and exploring the art of noise
Saturday night's triple bill at the Orpheum Theatre sounded scary, like a monster movie but with guitars. Lots of them. Played by three behemoth bands whose names conjured ancient beasts, puppets made of meat, and a colossus constructed to spill all over the audience. The monsters may as well have been called Godzilla, King Kong, and Swamp Thing.
But in fact, Saturday's nearly four hour marathon featured not apes swatting planes from atop the Empire State Building, but rather an assemblage of variously shaggy dudes in Built to Spill, Dinosaur Jr., and the Meat Puppets armed with guitars and hitting us head on, full force.
These titans shared common ground, including a majestic air of the classic. Dinosaur Jr.'s original, beloved lineup - singer-guitarist J Mascis, bassist-singer Lou Barlow, and drummer Murph - has been back together and touring since 2005. The Puppets' Kirkwood brothers Curt (guitar) and Cris (bass) have also reconciled to revisit the warped legacy they began in Arizona three decades ago. And the night's headliners, Built to Spill, were revisiting past glories by performing their third and best album, 1997's "Perfect From Now On," in its epic entirety.
Beyond nostalgic touchstones, however, the three bands also shared a deep and abiding love for discursive noise and melodies caked with the grime, gristle, and fuzz of some lurching thing from beyond. And, of course, they loved volumes of volume (although this time out, the Meat Puppets opted for smaller amps - the better, perhaps, to distill their style of skewed psychedelia baked by the sun and other things. Or maybe they were just carving their own crooked path, as always). But sometimes, more isn't better.
Led by singer-guitarist Doug Martsch and expanded to a six-piece (including cello and a ferocious three-guitar frontline), Built to Spill's sprawling excess made its 80-minute closing set seem much longer. "Randy Described Eternity" and "I Would Hurt a Fly" were early bracing blasts, but eventually, as one improbably lengthy solo excursion fed into another digressive tangent, inspiration gave way to repetition. The cumulative effect was that of the band hammering its songs into something of a flat, shapeless mass.
In contrast, Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis invested old proto-indie-rock slabs like "Tarpit" and "Freak Scene" with freshly corrosive energy and a new vitality that blasted out his Marshall stacks. The trio's 60-minute set was a messy maelstrom, but with little pockets of magnificently cool, even pretty breezes of melody carved inside its core.
Unfortunately, the Puppets opened while people were still filing in from the $10 beer lines. But they seemed oblivious to the empty spaces around them and fully inhabited their own cracked universe, playing a loose and laid-back set that traded on shambling Grateful Dead-style jams as filtered through the acid-fried synapses of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators. 