NEW ALBUMS
A decade on, the once-unlikely reunion of Mascis and Barlow is delivering some of Dinosaur Jr.’s finest music ever. By Stevie Chick. Illustration by Bill McConkey.
Dinosaur Jr. give more than a glimpse. Plus, Teenage Fanclub, De La Soul, Modern Studies and many more.
Though it signals no seismic shift in direction for their trademark dog-eared, heart-sleeved sound, Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not is nevertheless a landmark for Dinosaur Jr. Their eleventh LP, it’s also the fourth Dinosaur since the group’s original line-up mended their bridges over a decade ago, meaning the reunited trio have now stayed together longer and recorded more albums than their original incarnation, an achievement all the more impressive when one considers the legendary and enduring acrimony that followed founding bassist Lou Barlow’s exit after 1988’s Bug. There was nothing wrong with the albums bandleader J Mascis cut as Dinosaur Jr. in the interim, with the ragged glory air-guitar anthems of the grunge-era Where You Been, or the bruised melancholia of Without A Sound. The intriguing weirdness of earlier albums like You’re Living All Over Me left with Barlow, but on Bug Mascis had coined what became his signature sound: croaky, drawled songcraft crossing the ’80s US underground’s noise-soaked sensibility with frayed, countrified classic-rock roots, fusing his generation’s affection for quiet/loud dynamics with unabashed, emotive guitar heroics from another era. It was a sound Mascis nurtured throughout Dinosaur’s major label tenure, one he stuck with for his post-Jr. outfit The Fog. And when, having outgrown the adolescent tensions that had marred their post-adolescent relationship, Mascis and Barlow buried the hatchet and beckoned drummer Murph back aboard, the band largely picked up from where Mascis had left off, not where Barlow jumped ship. While sounding reinvigorated and surer of touch than Dinosaur’s original 1997 swansong Hand It Over, 2007’s Beyond was – Barlow’s excellent two songs aside – pure Mascis music, as were 2009’s Farm, and 2012’s I Bet On Sky. Neil Young – a key influence on Dinosaur’s “ear-bleeding country” – once characterised his discography as “one long song”; Mascis’s resembles one long guitar solo, upon which verses and choruses occasionally intrude. And he only gets better at channelling that essence. So Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not is prime Mascis music, Dinosaur sounding long at ease with what they are and do, but still thrilled by the possibilities within that framework. Mascis once said he eschewed the alternative tunings explored by contemporaries like Sonic Youth because he often found even the choices offered by regular tuning overwhelming; on this evidence, he hasn’t exhausted that potential. Much of Give A Glimpse… has the warm familiarity of a beloved sweater, but none of it sounds rote or autopilot. Mascis might be tending the same patch, but there’s fresh flowers sprouting from that soil. It begins with a belch of feedback, giving way to fast-strummed major chords on metallic guitar, Murph’s hammering drums and crash cymbal, and Mascis’s hazy poetics. He has this gift as a songwriter where, out of context, many of his lyrics and titles (Yeah Right, What Else Is New, I Ain’t Sayin) read like text-messages from sarcastic teens. And yet, sung in his papery drawl and drenched in the electric pathos and ache of Dinosaur Jr. at full pelt, simple, smoggy choruses like Goin Down’s “Are you with me/When I’m gone?” seem profound and dramatic. And so it goes: the upbeat stomp of Tiny lifts a chord-sequence from The Who’s Pure And Easy with enough bonhomie to pull off the crime; Be A Part’s minor chord chime could be Tom Petty at his bluest, stinging salvos of Mascisian fret-play driving its gloomy message home; the wonderful, uncertain choruses of Lost All Day sluice aching vocals over swooning walls of tremolo-bar guitar. These songs could all have appeared on any Mascis LP since 1993, and that’s not a slight on his invention, but praise for his consistency. Mascis could sell this sound by the yard, and you wouldn’t be a fool for buying it. But elsewhere, there’s still room for fucking with that formula, as when Knocked Around switches up from the lovely, gauzy holding pattern of its first couple of minutes – Mascis dreamily murmuring “I miss you all the time” again and again – to a drum-pummelling summit of guitar-play. Then there’s I Walk For Miles, a doomy, heavy detour originally penned for (but never recorded by) Mascis’s stoner-rock side-project Witch, which brings to mind an old interview quote from Evan Dando. After hearing Dinosaur in the mid-’80s, the Lemonhead said he never again “felt self-conscious about liking Black Sabbath” among his Boston indie contemporaries; here, Dinosaur once more tap into the Sabs’ primal, slo-mo grind, applying goblin-troubling riffage to affairs of the heart, as they did on early classics like The Leper. And then there’s Barlow’s two gems. He claims Love Is… was inspired by Bradford soft-rockers Smokie, but its dark folk rock sounds closer to Fairport Convention or The Byrds at their most gothic, lending a bleak chill to his wisdoms. Left/Right, meanwhile, sounds like Barlow’s other band, Sebadoh, in the best way: understated, selflacerating, sad-hearted pop, its disconsolate synth-hook and Barlow’s high-register vocals move with guileless skill. “Craftsmanlike” does a disservice to the inspiration here, but the steady, unbroken stream of high-standard Mascis music this last decade suggests that, while it’s hard to identify a tangible change in Dinosaur’s approach since their reunion, something in the chemistry between Mascis and Barlow pushes the former towards his greatest work. And while conflict was once their fuel, the more sanguine mood within their braintrust proves equally effective at keeping Dinosaur’s show on the road. Long may they run.