Dinosaur Jr

Review: I'll say this for the Metro: they're not afraid of mixing things up. While Dinosaur Jr were playing the main room, there was something going on in The Lair (fenced off from we plebs) with bands playing incompetent blues and ill-rehearsed funk to a crowd of uncritical friends. A lot of venues would think twice about running these shows side by side, but I for one found the mix of international indie-rock touring act and apparent 21st birthday celebration to be refreshing - and certainly they encouraged a lot of people to catch all of Deaf Wish's set in the main room rather than endure Sydney's least impressive jam band rockin' the party near the front bar.

The main room was comfortably full by the time the headliners took the stage, which was necessary just to absorb the sheer volume: both J Mascis and Lou Barlow had a city skyline of amps behind them and the front of house struggled to place vocals over the top, reducing much of the set to being effectively instrumental. Not that it was a problem, mind: no band sounds like Dinosaur Jr quite as much as Dinosaur Jr which made the details of the set almost irrelevant: Barlow plays the bass like it's a rhythm guitar, Murph is implacable behind the kit, and Mascis just reels the solos out like a savant. And that was also good, because this was a set that avoided a lot of the Hits: while ‘Freak Scene', ‘Feel the Pain' and a breakneck version of ‘Over It' were highlights, the trio delved more into the sideroads than the highway. In any case, there are a thousand-odd Sydneysiders with noticably impaired hearing this morning. Andrew P Street