It was a busy night for music Wednesday.
I started off at the Webster Underground to see John Ralston, whose pretty decent debut, "Needle Bed, was re-released by Vagrant a couple months ago. The Florida musician writes introspective songs that are sure to earn him comparisons to Dashboard Confessional, but Ralston, 28, is more thoughtful than Chris Carrabba, and his tunes are more melodic than Dashboard's early acoustic bludgeonings.
Ralston's music is heavy on world weariness, and his ruminative tunes are perfect for those late nights when sleep is elusive. His tousled, in-need-of-comfort persona clearly resonated with the phalanx of teen girls clustered around the front of the stage. He alternated between full-band arrangements, with piano, guitar, bass and drums, and solo-acoustic turns on songs with titles like, "Whose Heart Are You Breaking Tonight?" His best song, "No One Said It Was Easy," is incredibly bleak, but there's a strange, underhanded bit of optimism when he sings, "Keep your chin up, maybe things will work out right." Although his second-best song is a bit melodramatic, is pretty compelling, too:
Then it was on to Toad's Place for Dinosaur Jr., which had a bunch of its gear stolen the night before in New York.
Despite the theft, I think the band sounded better than it did a year ago in Northampton. The trio was devastatingly loud, as always, but guitarist J Mascis benefitted from the warm, rich growl that only occurs when you crank your amplifier all the way up and let the signal distort naturally. In Mascis' case, it was a wall of amplifiers cranked all the way up, but whatever works.
The original lineup recorded only three albums together, which sort of limits the band's reunion-tour repertoire, but those songs are enough. There had been talk of sound problems at earlier gigs on the tour, but Dinosaur Jr. sounded pretty crisp to me on the noise-rock rave-up "Sludgefeast" and the band's alt-anthem "Freak Scene." My review of Dinosaur's show runs Friday.
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