Dinosaur Jr. blisses out at the Fillmore at the TLA

If there were another universe, one in which squeaky-voiced men with Coke-bottle glasses and long, stringy hair have a shot at stardom, J. Mascis would have been a rock god.

As the only constant member of Dinosaur Jr., Mascis has spent 25 years letting his six-string speak for him. At the Fillmore at the TLA on Friday night, he was flanked on three sides by towering amplifiers, as if he were concerned someone might sneak up behind him while he was blissing out.

The reunion of the band's original lineup - including Lou Barlow on bass and the man known as Murph on drums - has restored much-needed balance. Though the songs frequently stretched past the six-minute mark (they managed just 16 in an hour and a half), Barlow's elastic lines and Murph's ferocious fills provided a rock-hard structure that anchored Mascis' free-flowing solos.

In "Pieces," from the excellent new Farm, Mascis countered crunching chords with delicate arpeggios, shifting seamlessly between rough and smooth.

Even the stray riffs he impatiently tossed off between songs would have done Jimi Hendrix proud.

In that same universe where Mascis is a star, Bob Mould would be headlining the show. With the foundational crunch of his influential band Husker Du, the speed-pop of his former Sugar and his eclectic solo career, Mould merged the aggressiveness of hard core with a sure-footed sense of melody and a knack for transmuting anger into cathartic aggression.

His hour-long set started off furious and built from there. Mould's digression into electronic music over the last few years had even longtime followers scratching their heads (those albums were given away free with purchases at the merch table), but with District Line and the new Life and Times, Mould has proven he can still rage with the best of them.

Together with backup punk duo the Missingmen, Barlow opened the show, drawing mostly from his solo albums but also fitting a smattering of Sebadoh and Folk Implosion songs into his 30 minutes.

Although Barlow only strapped on a bass for the last two songs, he got enough low-end rumble out of his modified guitar to make the ground shake. Inconsistency is endemic to Barlow's catalog, and even his brief set had a few clunkers, but the sea of noise parted long enough to let through the vulnerability of "Home."

His solo material was less driven than the handful of songs he sang with Dinosaur Jr., but its rambling qualities only made it seem more delicate.