Pop Music : Dinosaur Jr. Finally Finds Its Niche

In a punk-rock career, if it lasts long enough, there comes the time when a band learns to play well enough to approximate the influences that it was just flailing at before: X, for example, sounding more like roots country; the Replacements, like a Midwestern bar band. Sometimes, something is lost when proficiency begins to augment passion. At least part of punk-rock’s appeal lies in its disdain for traditional pop values.

At the Palladium on Friday, critics’ fave Dinosaur Jr. finally got its Buffalo Springfield thing down to a T, pinched, plaintive vocals, strum-like two-chord riffs, relentlessly sing-songy melodies, but lacked the sort of sleepy intensity the Amherst trio seemed to have when it was noisier--and fell altogether short of Neil Young’s pop intelligence.

The clean-cut blues-guitar solos--leader J Mascis seems incapable of playing guitar and singing at the same time--sounded pasted in from a Night Ranger album or something, and the energy level was about what you’d have expected from a decaffeinated hoot-night folk act at a coffeehouse.

Nirvana, the power trio from Washington state, shed just enough of its trademark grungy guitar feedback to expose out-of-tune vocals, unfocused harmonies and serious Monkees aspirations--the most formulaic kind of ‘60s pop craftsmanship. Their sound, full enough at a place like Raji’s or Bogart’s, was thin; their formerly anarchic stage presence was somewhere in the gray zone between charming and accomplished. So much for good, old-fashioned anti-rock ‘n’ roll.