Dinosaur Jr./Snail Mail/Easy Action @ Lena Horne Bandshell, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY 7/17/25

 

Bill: Dinosaur Jr./Snail Mail/Easy Action

Venue: Lena Horne Bandshell, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY

Date: 7/17/25

Door: $63.45 

8:45 Dinosaur Jr.

Active: 1983 (Amherst, MA)

Latest Release: Guess I'll Crawl (Live in Santa Monica) (Cherry Red, 2025), Sweep It Into Space (Jagjaguwar, 2021)

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7:45 Snail Mail

Active: 2015 (Baltimore via Endicott City, MD)

Latest Release: Valentine (Matador, 2021), Valentine Demos (Matador/Beat, 2023)

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7:00pm Easy Action

Active: 1998 (Detroit, MI)

Latest Release: "Already Alright/Better Off Dead" (split 7" with Snakewing) (Underground Communique Records, 2013), Friends of Rock 'n' Roll (Reptillian, 2005)

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I last checked in on Dinosaur Jr. at one of the residency shows at Music Hall of Williamsburg in December, 2023.  That tour was the 30th anniversary of Where You Been which Lou wasn't on.  Nowadays Lou will tackle songs like "Out There" or "Feel The Pain" with professional zeal as if he's always played on them.    I'll see them every few years or so since about 1988 even though before that I knew them in real time before they had to tag the Jr. at the end of their name.  They were a different, angrier and sloppy band when I saw them at Bunratty's in Allston and especially some short-lived club called The Club in Worcester right before Lou departed in 1989.   However, the recordings around that time were the best the band did.   Anyway, they are a greatest hits band now even though they put out records--the last studio one being Sweet It Into Space from 2021.  They've had some archival releases since.  Cherry Red has a new live one and Farm got a 15-year anniversary reissue.   

Snail Mail referred to them as a band she worshiped from the 90's.  There was lots of drama with Lou Barlow out of the band most of that decade but Lindsey Jordan wasn't born until 1999 so it's all history out of real time the way the 60's was to me.  That said, the fact that Lou Barlow was out of the band from 1991-2007 has now been obscured by 18 years of rejoining happily ever after with Murph the original drummer, who was also out a while.  So all this grownup drama has been replaced by Dinosaur Jr. being a symbol of a fully functional veteran band with original members for all of Lindsay's consciousness.

Last year I saw Snail Mail in Central Park for free and didn't think much of the band.  I forgot exactly why.  This year I thought she seemed a little "more pro."  "Did she get a new guitarist?" I asked myself.  He seems kind of slick.  Sure enough I looked at the clips from last year and she played as a trio.  So kudos to Snail Mail for solving a big problem in real time. At first pass I thought the few songs she said were new songs seemed like the best songs of the night even if the later ones had people in the audience singing along. The whole point of a tour like this, from the sands of time is to take 2 totally different crowds and have them play in a space bigger than both of them.  It seemed to work well, Prospect Park was packed out for a $60 show.  I could see that the quieter elements of some of J's songs were not that far off from what Snail Mail was doing.  However, those might be the elements of J's songwriting where my brain thinks about other things until the good parts happen except it happens the whole show.  People like her music, even (gasp) older people, but for me it's two shows in two years where I've struggled to find a song in her set I thought was good.  Last year I was fixating on people with snapping hand fans, this year I was fixating on how she sounds slightly better and wondering if she was going to button up her half-buttoned shirt from the bottom at some point even if I knew damn well it was just a fashionable take on anti-fashion.  But I couldn't stop thinking about it as she switched guitars after each song.  Is it wrong to find her music so boring I had to come up with other things to think about related to the performance?

I could also see how conceptually the other side of the coin was represented with Easy Action.  Since John Brannon represents the original wave of hardcore that J and Lou came out of with Deep Wound.  Negative Approach still beats them by a couple of years and John Brannon came out at the end with "T. V. Eye" by The Stooges.  The late Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton shared Lou Barlow's July 17 birthday (Lou blew out a cake) and before Lou rejoined J, he did gigs with Ron in the early aughts covering the Stooges.  With Brannon's Detroit heritage it all comes together.

Easy Action only got 20 minutes.  Annoyingly I decided to buy a walk-up ticket to save the fees but when I got there, Prospect Park's "box office" (a table with a guest list guy and someone with a laptop) and a giant QR square code taped to the table to send to straight to TicketBastard.  Of course, the useless ap went straight to the circle of death as I could hear Brannon hitting the stage for his 20 opening minutes, which I usually circumvent by going to the website.  Alas, it was now a couple minutes after 7 and the sales were taken offline even though the show wasn't sold out.  Fortunately, the person with the laptop was able to enter the info and text me the link for the ticket as valuable Easy Action minutes were ticking off the clock so I was able to get in there by the second song.  Keep in mind, if Easy Action weren't on the bill, I may very well have blown this show off since I was flying solo, so I was a little grumpy to not get in on time even though I got there before 7.

Easy Action has evolved to be the "commercial rock friendly" wing of the perpetually touring Negative Approach.  Usually, it works out that NA will have a big gig on a hardcore package tour and maybe Easy Action plays a club.  However, with Dinosaur Jr. gigs, Negative Approach got added at TV Eye on an open date the night before after Easy Action got this tour.  Neither band has released anything the past decade plus, but they have been on the road relentlessly and like Dinosaur Jr., have been around long enough that archival material gets out.  I spoke to Harold Richardson a bit the night before and he was super psyched to be on an MC5 tribute NA was selling Jocephus and the George Jonestown Massacre's Call Me Animal: A Tribute To The MC5.  Not only is he on a record with Alice Cooper whose album gave forth the band name, but his name is on the bottom right corner with so many luminaries.

FOR FURTHER REVIEW:

Snail Mail @ Central Park Summerstage, New York, NY 8/27/24

Negative Approach @ TV Eye, Queens, NY 7/16/25

Negative Approach @ TV Eye, Queens, NY 8/3/24

Dinosaur Jr.-Without A Sound (1994)

Sentridoh-The Mysterious Sentridoh EP (1993)

Sebadoh-Local Band Feel (1994)

Sebadoh-Rocking The Forest (1992)

Sebadoh-Smash Your Head On The Punk Rock (1992)