it’s only short….

LOGO magazine

..but sweet

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J Mascis + The Fog
"Free So Free"
(City Slang)
Released: 14 October 2002

Two albums in three years: that’s pretty good going for J Mascis. In earlier times he led (scratch that; he was) Dinosaur Jr in the grunge wars of the early 90s with nothing but a vintage Fender Jazzmaster and a host of distortion boxes as back-up. In the year 2002 he does pretty much the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but you can’t ever imagine J’s particular brand of fuzz-country opening the doors to a new (read: younger) audience. A J Mascis show generally consists of the man himself, the aforementioned guitar and stomp boxes, and a few dozen thirty-somethings with bad hair and fade-to-grey Dinosaur t-shirts looking on in hushed reverie. This is something of a shame, songs as propulsive as ‘Everybody Lets Me Down’ (an updated version of ‘Freakscene’, his one bona-fide classic) and the balls-out ‘Set Us Free’ deserve a wider audience. In short it’s great, cranked-up slacker-rock. The Dinosaur still roams the earth.

Adrian Read