Can’t find a butter man

By Warren Jerred

I’m a Dinos fan. I’m also a huge Pearl Jam fan. Unfortunately for me, both have disappointed me as of late. The Dinos teams of the past few seasons are much like the last few Pearl Jam albums; you like it because of what they have meant to you in the past, but something’s missing. In both cases, it’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what that something is.

As Editor-in-Chief Kris Kotarski pointed out last week, the current cast of Dinos don’t exactly command the respect of opponents as past editions of the team have. Again, the similarities with Pearl Jam are uncanny. On an album like Ten, finding a song you didn’t like was impossible; it was a solid effort from start to finish. Newer releases, however, have me searching for those three or four good songs out of the 12 on the album; a proportion startlingly similar to the Dinos win/loss ratio.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a Dinos fan, and I own and listen to every Pearl Jam CD ever released, but I don’t quite have the enthusiasm for either I once had.

This brings me to my final comparison of the two; the potential to return to greatness. Sure, Pearl Jam has a different drummer, and the Dinos don’t have Bill Byma or Jeremy Wilcox, but they’re still the same band, right? So they could get back to writing the meaningful songs they once did.

With two losses to Saskatchewan to end the first half of the season, the Dinos are 3-7 with ten matches remaining. Kelly Cherniwchan will return from his eye injury, Denis Zhukov will return, and Lee Czernick, the Dinos’ setter the last time they had a winning season, will also be back in action.

With a new line-up, the Dinos need a new outlook because, to be analogous to Pearl Jam once more, people go to a concert to rock out to “Even Flow,” or belt out “Alive,” not to listen to songs about bugs accompanied by an accordion.