Dinosaur Jr.; The Walkmen @ Central Park Summerstage

Dinosaur Jr.; The Walkmen; Saviours
@ Central Park Summerstage
New York, NY - August 16, 2009

An Ode to Shred, by Elwood D. Pennypacker: Oh Shred. Oh inordinate amounts of Shred. How I love thee. Especially when thou art emanating from the fingers, guitar, and amplifiers of one J. Mascis. How thou art the ultimate sound of rock n' roll I can never relent from. I love thee.

Yeah so a good mood J. Mascis was tearing it up this afternoon at Central Park with Lou and Murph pounding it down at their respective stations. "I Want You To Know", "Imagination Blind", and "I Don't Want to Go There" from the new Farm LP were on display as were "Been There All The Time" (which surprisingly was lacking in the shred department, the downer of the day), and the band's cover of the Cure's "Just Like Heaven". When Mascis wasn't wailing away, he was chewing up the riffs. Greatest guitarist alive? Quite possibly...

2 very different opening acts complemented the roaring sound of Dinosaur Jr. The Walkmen, long anticipated to be one of the next big things, have found themselves comfortably flowing along as critical and Indie radio darlings with a decent-sized fan-base. These clean cut-by-design New Yorkers continue to play their Strokes-like rock, in fact sounding like a true band of this decade (if this decade has its own sound, it's bands like this and Phoenix) and they have sprinkled in some Vampire Weekend-like globalism since that band formed and eclipsed them in the intervening years.

Saviours are a straight-up hardcore metal band. Most of the songs are all reworkings of Sabbath's "Children of the Grave", but they all work. This isn't my genre, but if it was, I'd listen to this band a lot.