Volume, that founding ally of rock, has always managed to play a role that ranges from the aspirational (amplifying the original sources of electricity to be heard at a distance) to the laughable, like that sketch in the movie This is Spinal Tap (1984), where the fictional band was looking for the holy grail of getting equipment where the VU meters read up to 11, instead of 10.
Just as in the early ’70s there was talk of dead dogs at the massive American shows. Grand Funk Railroad or, further back in time and place, we were given earplugs for the show by the northerners as well. Swans in Niceto, part of the legend of the trio Dinosaur Jr It was about his role as an eardrum breaker, something that could be seen in his first visit to Argentina (2012) although it was not as loud (and occasional) as the debut of Oasis at Luna Park (1998).
On this occasion, Thursday night at the ART Media in Chacarita, they seem to have slowed down the technical device, but not the tricks and the musical approach. Less volume and more musical expansion. Loose and friendly with each other, while they also had the reputation of being the biggest sociopaths who have ever locked themselves together in a rehearsal room, and from there to the world. But in the meantime, a negative record, some historical projections. Simultaneously, and in the ’80s, they inspired two of the decisive scenes of the ’90s onwards.
On the one hand, the shoegaze movement, named after the fixation of looking at one’s feet in order to find the right arsenal of pedals that requires music rich in textures and electric grain, which had the British as its biggest fans. My Bloody Valentinewho in the process exercised sympathy in the Soda Stereo of Dynamo (1992). And on the other, as absolute precursors of grunge, which they fed with their sonorous miasma of punk, heavy rock and pop, being Nirvana one of his great admirers. All very proto, given that they themselves are “the children of the dinosaur.”
Lou Barlow. The bassist who doesn’t seem to age. Photo: Nadia Guzmán.His current show is essentially based on You’re Living All Over Me (1987) or one of the best albums of the ’80s that will never be heard on Fm Aspen. It was once said, and we quote it so accurately, that the central activity of the leader’s father, J.Mascishaving been that of a qualified dentist seems analogous to the musical form of his songs. Because just as it is said that a perfect smile consists of 32 aligned teeth, many of his songs are made up of multiple motifs, passages and landscapes that mobilize different climates, earthquakes and plateaus. Explosions and craters, volcanoes and meteor showers, sound lakes and cenotes.
Mascis, a man who is already approaching six decades without giving up his long and now gray hair, looks like the magician Gandalf of the lord of the rings. He sings like a child who sees a rainbow for the first time and makes the six strings roar like a stormbringer, a rebellious student of the postulates of Benjamin Franklin. He could aspire to a higher position on the podium of the great guitarists in history, where he is usually placed in the Top 100, if it weren’t for the fact that he prefers to dedicate himself to textures and riffs, to detours and ghostly couplings.
Murph. An effective drummer in the middle of the tornado. Photo: Nadia Guzmán.His side and emotional nemesis, the bassist Lou Barlow (also known as the prolific and talented songwriter for his own band, Stupid) now looks incredibly younger than two and a half decades ago. With his long, wavy hair, his tight T-shirt and his jeans, he looks like Iván Noble’s most poster moment in Los Caballeros de la Quema, in the mid-’90s. At its capillary antipodes, but concentrated, effective and passionate, Murph He is the bald drummer who completes this classic and original lineup, reunited with glory since 2005.
We said, loose and more relaxed with the decibels, at times they ignore the structures of the songs, especially in their second half. You have to hear and see how they abandon their most classic and well-known song, the brilliant Freak Scene (a panning of guitar sounds and lyrics that evaporate the semantic possibilities of formal communication) to leave it in a drift that, in its own way, dialogues with the public shipwrecks of Bob Dylan and his band in this millennium. In the middle of the show, in Sludgefeastthey remember the times when no one talked about stoner rock as a genre and they already practiced it. AND Gargoylefrom their first album (1985), sung by Barlow, doubles the original length for a cacophonous marathon that, like the great moments of rock, rushes to get nowhere. Ecstatic. Hendrixian.
As a last encore, they were saved Just Like Heavenhis particular and surpassing version of the classic The Curerecorded just a year after the original, where they create their own version of that ethereal paradise only to make it collapse in an abrupt ending. It was, and continues to be, a reinterpretation full of naivety and malice, that tempting oxymoron that still makes so many approach rock even at the risk of getting burned.