Gig played on 09/06/05

According to your world view, the rock 'n' roll reunion wave is either reaching a thrilling peak - allowing anyone who missed out on history the first time around the chance to see what everyone else was always banging on about - or is dumping on us a horde of geriatrics who risk sullying their former glory by refusing to hang up their effects pedals.

Dinosaur Jr are the latest proto-grunge iconoclasts to have come out of retirement. Since his acrimonious departure in 1989, Lou Barlow has been thoroughly successful with his Sebadoh/Sentridoh and Folk Implosion projects, while J. Mascis reformed and once again disbanded Dinosaur Jr, before launching his short-lived Fog. What the notoriously taciturn guitarist has been doing for the past few years, however, is a mystery. Preparing for this, maybe. With previously insurmountable ego and communication problems apparently sorted, Mascis and Barlow are making their touchingly frayed, thrillingly distorted, extraordinarily influential and damned LOUD magic once more. Right here, right now.

Any doubts as to their relevance are blown clean away the moment they shuffle on and lunge in with "Gargoyle". With his long, now grey locks, Mascis may look like scary Bob from "Twin Peaks", but his brutal way with six strings and an effects rack sees him annihilate the boundaries between heavy metal, psych rock and pop in a series of scorched solos and, via channels of raw power, feed into the swarming crowd a feeling so basic it's beyond explanation. Barlow looks happier than he has done for years, rocking back and forth on his heels as he pushes out those subterranean bass lines, joking and mumbling thanks in a manner that suggests he can't quite believe it's happening, either.

As "Bulbs Of Passion", "Raisans", "Little Fury Things", "Tarpit", "Repulsion" and the rest of Dinosaur Jr's sludgy, knockabout genius rains down upon us at satisfyingly extreme volume, the 18 years since "You're Living All Over Me" was released are vaporised by the music's sheer vitality. The ragged glory and Mach 10 emotional force of Mascis's style may owe much to Neil Young, but really, ground zero for contemporary guitar music was marked out when Dinosaur Jr hatched.

The baying for slacker anthem "Freak Scene" ends only when those joyous, introductory notes - burned in the brains of a generation - ring out in the second encore and Mascis's muttered "so fu*ked you can't believe it" rallies the faithful in a surge of flailing limbs. Their name, of course, was originally Mascis's jokey nod to his band's heritage, but on tonight's showing, rock music's evolution is unlikely to ever make Dinosaur Jr extinct.

by Sharon O'Connell