As the singer and guitarist of Dinosaur Jr, J Mascis was always an unlikely figurehead for the late-1980s US grunge rock movement. Where Kurt Cobain had the nihilistic edge and Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell the rock-star swagger, Mascis always resembled a befuddled roadie who had wandered on and plugged in.
Yet even the notoriously inanimate performances of his youth were positively dynamic compared with his current incarnation. Alone on stage and now stocky of build and with a grey mane flowing from under his baseball cap, the taciturn Mascis sits inside a bunker of monitors and flight cases like a grizzled survivalist.
His recent album, Tied to a Star, saw him largely eschew his trademark fuzz and distortion in favour of more nuanced, acoustic dynamics, and tonight’s show reflects that shift. Mid-paced murmurs such as Me Again and Stumble capture his perennial mood of stoned torpor and yet sound as fragile and exquisitely troubled as Bon Iver.
Mascis applies this newfound sensitive approach to selected gems from the Dinosaur Jr back catalogue, with his queasy falsetto creating light and shade at the heart of Not the Same where previously there was just obliterating noise. A freshly vulnerable figure, he even covers Mazzy Star’s Fade into You with a delicacy true to its spectral ethereality.
Old habits die hard, and he ladles feedback over the priapic adolescent throb of the 30-years-old Quest before applying a 10-minute valedictory noise squall to the haunting, haunted Alone and yelping through the Cure’s Just Like Heaven. It’s a performance that has been all the more effective for being quite hypnotically low-key.
• At the Haunt, Brighton, tonight. Box office: 01273 736618. At the Ruby Lounge, Manchester, on Saturday. Box office: 0161-834 1392.
