Heavy Blanket

While rather goofy and perhaps somewhat (ok, completely) fabricated, Heavy Blanket's supposed origins - replete with ‘80s teen slackers, tubas repurposed as drug paraphernalia and an Army vet uncle with a penchant for obscure Japanese psych rock - does provide some keen insight into the creative impetus behind this sans-vocals J. Mascis side project. Heavy Blanket is the stuff of skateboard video soundtracks and adolescences spent dwelling in smoky basements, an album for kids who love Sabbath and Wipers at their heaviest but wish there was a record that cut through all the self-serious posturing and just plain shredded. Stripped of his humanizing glued-to-the-couch whine, Mascis gets all mongrel-like, wielding his axe like someone (or something) nightmarish and newly emerged from a swamp. With its lethargic rhythm section and ceaseless onslaught of ear-crippling effects pedals, Heavy Blanket plays like the Band of Gypsys submerged in purple mud, a sort of album-length guitar solo with barely differentiable tracks. Indulgent and unvaried by design, this listener-unfriendly experience will likely be too much overflowing fuzz for many Dinosaur Jr. devotees, let alone the uninitiated. Still, there's something endearing about the perma-teen ethos behind Heavy Blanket, and it's not difficult to imagine that in the future, succeeding generations of young Mascis fans will regard this detour as a forgotten gem, the perfect album to pump through headphones concealed under greasy locks of hair while drawing band logos on Trapper Keepers.