Buffalo Tom: Moshing with the Middle-Aged Crowd

CONCERT

Buffalo Tom

at Avalon

Amid the current spate of "alternative" rock bands looking more like an Urban Outfitters ad than a music group, every city needs at least one upstart band with its eye on what made punk rock great in the first place--raging guitars, drums pounding out a fiercely danceable beat and lyrics which drench themselves in the sufferings of everyday urban life.

Boston has plenty of bands with this vision, but Buffalo Tom, who appeared last week at Avalon, is among the best. With simple, irrestible rhythms and vocals pleading raspily for lost love, the band's universal sound drew together traditional city rivals into the mosh pit--frat boys bent on dancing to anything with a hard beat, and the flannel-and-nose-ring crowd, fiercely attentive to every inflection in singer Bill Janovitz's songs of woe.

Buffalo Tom's music, for those who haven't heard their college-rock hit "Velvet Roof," is meat and potatoes for the mosh-starved. You'll think that you might have heard their music before, and you probably have--they sound like blisteringly-loud late Replacements, filled out with plenty of requisite feedback. There isn't much new about Buffalo Tom, but their grasp of what's old makes for nothing less than perfect grunge pop.

The band started the set with "Birdbrain," the title track from their 1989 album, with Janovitz wrenching out his tormented vocals as the rhythm section gnashed beneath him. He doesn't always hit the note right, and often there's more noise coming out of him that song. But this isn't k.d. lang--he's supposed to be in agony, and his imperfect, sincere singing makes the band seem like they rehearse in your neighbor's basement.

The rest of the set didn't move much from that sublime spot; under the high-volume treatment the music got, even the ballads sounded primed for moshing. The boozy crowd, dotted with plastered forty-year-olds ready for a fistfight, obliged fiercely. Half the crowd was in the air, and those who weren't were hurling each other around the floor.

Their current hit, "Taillights Fade," got the crowd pensive. Janovitz's guitars, Chris Colbourn's bass and Tom Maginnis's drums slowly rework the same few chords while Janovitz pleads to his ex-girlfriend that he'll get over her rejection. It's the same old story, but his raspy voice sounds triumphant in lines like "I've hit the wall, I'm about to fall...Watch my taillights fade to black." "Porchlight," also from their current album "Let Me Come Over," isn't any happier. With a folky bounce, Janovitz tells the story of--surprise--an unhappy relationship.

With such sparing, honest music, Avalon seemed inappropriate. The flashy lights and disco balls were too gaudy for a band which thrives on simplicity. With ads for WFNX and the Phoenix hanging every few feet, the band often looked like they were playing in a soda commercial.

The band's been big in the Boston music scene for about four years now, having started while at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Often dubbed "Dinosaur Jr. Jr.," the band grew under the tutelage of J. Mascis, a fellow UMass alum and backbone of Dinosaur Jr. The bands' sounds aren't too far apart, but with a few more years under their belt, Buffalo Tom may develop the sound in their own right. They have, at least, spread beyond college-rock listeners and have started to attract anyone, even violent, drunken old men, to the mosh pit.

Tom headed a quadruple bill at the Avalon, following Boston blues rockers Morphine. Looking and sounding like something out of a David Lynch movie, Morphine left the crowd a little stunned. With pumping bass and soulful sax, the band, which came close to winning the WBCN Rumble last year, won some converts in the plaid and fratboy crowd.

Before that was Dambuilders, a nearly hard-core group whose feedback-stuffed guitarwork was topped by nothing less than an electric violin. Their thick sound got the crowd stomping after the opening act, Crow, good-naturedly meandered through a couple bad songs, looking as though they were hearing them for the first time.