Mascis works some old magic in Witch
By Jonathan Perry, Globe Correspondent | June 10, 2006

CAMBRIDGE — Just like the dude in the Witch song "Rip Van Winkle," Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis’s latest venture finds him waking up after, like, a hundred-year nap, with lots and lots of long grey hair. But instead of the future, he’s way in the past — like "War Pigs"-era Sabbath past, dude — in a dungeon in the middle of a spooky forest, where the trees are alive and an army of downtuned guitars trudge through murky mist and quicksand sludge, flattening everything in their wake. It must have been the distant past, because Mascis wasn’t making the neck of his guitar scream with distortion and feedback as he usually does in Dinosaur Jr. Instead, he was seated behind a big drum kit painted psychedelic blue and orange, surrounded by cymbals and flanked by stacks of Marshall amplifiers. And he had thick wooden sticks in his hand, just like back in the early ’80 s when Mascis started his first band, Deep Wound, a crude crew of Amherst high school hardcore malcontents. (Mostly ignored by the masses in their day, Deep Wound’s pre-Dinosaur fossils — homemade T-shirts, seven-inch slabs of wax — make for expensive archeological digs on eBay).

The weird thing was, Mascis didn’t seem at all surprised to find himself banging away at the drums at the Middle East, surrounded by his long-haired friends Dave Sweetapple on bass, Kyle Thomas on voice and guitar, and Asa Irons on lead guitar, Thomas and Irons moonlighting from their other band, the freak-folk outfit Feathers. It was Thursday night — practically the weekend, dude — so there were a lot of believers throwing up devil horns and nodding in delighted assent to the elephantine riffs and dirge-y throb of “Black Saint" and the thick-as-oatmeal, tranquilized boogie of “Seer."

“I was lost, just a madman, just a sad man," wailed Thomas on the latter tune, relating his aimless wandering through the metal graveyards of his mind. “I had no future until one day, yeah, I met a man, I took his hand. . . . Yeaoooowwww!!!!" Cue belly scream/coyote howl at the moon. And so it went like this for 40 minutes, with the hairy man-beasts reaching low and aiming high.

Dungen , the night’s Swedish headliners, preferred a brighter landscape, conjuring rolling, kaleidoscopic clouds of prog rock that proved nothing less than a revelation. Led by the talented multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes (voice, guitar, keyboards, flute!), Dungen lit a bonfire inside which King Crimson and Blue Cheer gloriously burned like beacons, now and forever.

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