For a LONG minute there in the late '00s and early '10s, it seemed like every band wanted to be Dinosaur Jr. Now no one does. Ironically, at the start of the '90s nostalgia boom that crested in the early part of this decade, anyone worth their salt stopped wanting to sound like a band Michael Azerrad might have profiled in Our Band Could Be Your Life and moved on to greener pastures (or got an actual job, something). Maybe folks got the picture that he wasn't going to be writing an update/sequel and figured they might as well do something with the degree they spent the equivalent of a mortgage on a medium-sized family home. I learned about Amherst's California X at the tail end of the '80s-aping garage glut, because, well, that's when people were talking about them. Most critics at the time liked to treat California X as more derivative than they actually were, when in fact they were just very apt at capturing a classic sort of rock'n big hair vibe and didn't seem to put much currenty into cultivating clout in the shadows of their idols. They were a band that played, earnest to a fault, retro-sounding fuzz-imbued punk as if it had never occurred to anyone to crank your amps to 11 while spirit spear-fishing through Neil Young's back catalog before- And it worked!. As you might have guessed, the band had been dogged early on by comparisons to Dinosaur Jr., which the band often pushed back against as a superficial assessment of their sound. On their second album, Nights in the Dark (2015), California X made a conscious effort to shatter the impression that they were simply braiding chords from their indie rock forefathers' hair by adopting elements of progressive rock, Americana, and ballsy '70s arena anthems. That being said, that scuzzy SST-era, post-hardcore stomp that defined the best of J Mascis's early career can still be heard lumbering around in the background. Not surprisingly, seeing as the album was produced by Justin Pizzoferrato (who, yes, has produced records for Dino Jr., and Lou Barlow, as well as Speedy Ortiz, who were unfairly maligned at one point as the GIRL DINOSAUR JR.... critics were REALLY thoughtful and creative back in the day, I tell ya). If you're up to checking out this dusty old pick-me-up from my giddy garage rock phase, then I hope you get a kick out of the summer speedway anthem “Nights in the Dark,” with its Phil Lynott-worshipping leads, as well as the vigorous, charged and fluttery guitar sweeps of “Red Planet,” the bluesy, chops-busting guitars and naïve, indie rock charm of “Blackrazor (Pt. 2),” and the felty, distortion-wrapped, razor-toothed dirge “Summer Wall (Pt. 2).” Nights in the Dark might be California X's last album, but it was a real light at the end of the tunnel for me in the era in which it was released.
