J Mascis is from Amherst. Several years before the grunge explosion of the ‘90s, his band Dinosaur Jr. was already plowing and cultivating some of the sonic fields that Kurt Cobain and Nirvana would help harvest.
You could say that Mascis’s musical DNA was woven and built up from a strand of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer.” Lumbering, epic, hazy and monumentally distorted guitars create a sound world of howling feedback. But Mascis does have a mellow and pretty side, one that’s not untouched by wisps of Gen X irony.
Listen to his supremely chill 2011 Mellotron-kissed cover of Edie Brickell’s “Circle.” He makes throwing in the towel and shutting out the world sound like an aesthetic triumph. Or, if you prefer, turn on the morphine-drip of his blissed-out cover of the Mazzy Star classic “Fade Into You.”
Mascis just released “Elastic Days,” his seventh full-length solo record. Even with the volume, guitar heroics and indie-rock remoteness, his songs convey a shyness, vulnerability and a gentle nature. Mascis has a singing electric guitar tone, one that is in its own way as distinctive as those of Carlos Santana or Billy Gibbons. Artists like Kurt Vile have picked up Mascis’s sleepy-congested vocal style and run with it. Mascis’s music is the sound of long hair obscuring someone’s face.
J Mascis plays the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St., Hamden, on Dec. 9 at 8 p.m. $27.50 to $30. 203-288-6400, spaceballroom.com