Kevin Bronson on May 17th, 2011

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It’s not as if Buffalo Tom waited for the onset of middle age to reflect on maturing. Bill Janovitz sang “I feel like a dinosaur” on “Taillights Fade” in 1992, when he was 25 and looked like he hardly needed a razor. No, the undercurrent that has run through the Boston trio’s music – which has always been just loud enough to hurt and just soft enough to ache – is distance: the gap between the idea of who we want to be and the reality of who we are. The varying degrees of yearning, regret and even torment in Janovitz’s sandpapery voice speak to that, and the churn and swirl of the trio’s guitars balance it with hope. For eight albums now, Buffalo Tom’s music has felt like a call to action, and while their newest, “Skins” (which came out in February), doesn’t rock as hard as their 2007 return-to-form “Three Easy Pieces,” but it’s smart and sensitive and picks its spots. When Stereogum premiered “Arise, Watch,” they opined that the new music was “kind of like putting on your favorite sweater,” and for we who pogoed to every BT power chord in the ’90s, it couldn’t be more true. It’s beautiful that they’ve aged so gracefully.

||| Download: “Arise, Watch”

||| Live: Buffalo Tom headlines the Troubadour on Wednesday, with the Heavenly States opening.