In the days when slackers were king, the band Dinosaur Jr were the kings of the slackers. But in those hazy, sweaty flannelled days, in the immediate aftermath of the Seattle grunge ascendance, when Dinosaur Jr finally started to sell records on something approaching a respectable scale, they were barely a band anyway - its two resident geniuses, Lou Barlow and J Mascis, having, several years before, gone the way of two positively charged magnets: apart. In 1989, after having recorded three albums of punishingly loud, sloppy, buzzed out, bedroom-in-the-parents'-garage rock guitar heroism - a low-fi, low budget, but otherwise very high approximation of the 70s arena rock, the Live at Budokan bombast, the endless guitar solos - that loomed large over their suburban pre-adolescences - the band split apart in one of rock history's most notoriously ugly divorces (most cogently chronicled in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life), with J Mascis keeping the band name and achieving a small measure of stoner glory with MTV alterna-hits like "Start Choppin'" and "Feel the Pain", and Lou Barlow forming Sebadoh, one of the more celebrated indie rock bands of the 90s.
That 20 years on, the two might reconcile long enough to play a bunch of shows together would seem unlikely. That this reunion lasted long enough to produce an album is astonishing. That this reunion album, entitled Beyond is one of the best things the band has ever released, offering positive proof that the tumultuous partnership of Mascis and Barlow (along with original drummer Murph) once was and is once more one of the most vital of dysfunctional relationships in rock and roll is damn near miraculous: the record they might have made in 1989 had they ever gotten their shit together, a record full of smart, compact pop melodies, distorted and obscured by hallucinogenic clouds of overdriven power chords, wildly melodic, nearly virtuosic and entirely aimless guitar solos, and the humiliatingly muffled rumblings of Murph's tom-toms, which, especially on the opening track, a fazed cookie crumb of power-pop ecstacy called "Almost Ready", sound like they were recorded through a thin apartment wall.
Mascis has a voice like the frayed end of a dirty old shoelace, a cracked, drawling moan suggestive of an addled twenty-something dude facing the mother of all comedowns, a voice suspended in the half-awake, half-dreaming, blissed-out middle of a permanent nine-minute interval between snooze button hits - an immediately identifiable sound well suited songs like the howl of "It's Me" and the hypnotically beautiful Foo Fighter-ish drone of "Back to Your Heart", songs which hint at both an aspiration to prog-rock glory and the glorious laziness that would doom any such aspiration to wallowing failure. Listening to Beyond, you get the impression that no one expects less of this band, and less of this reunion than the band itself; and its this laconic sense of resignation and futility that gives the record a reckless glow, not to mention an almost zen-like clarity largely missing from their first life.
Twenty years after the end of their doomed incarnation, Dinosaur Jr achieve an improbable nirvana with unintelligible rock anthems like "This Is All I Came To Do", the almost jangly, uncommonly pretty, damaged goods folk of "We're Not Alone", and the riotous lead single "Been There All The Time". You don't have to know of or care about the band's distinguished history to ache with the aching vulnerability of Mascis's falsetto on "I Got Lost", to swoon to the wounded guitar heroism, to groove to the band's uncharacteristically punchy (however buried) rhythms, and revel in the album's bruised, unapologetically compressed sound (it's the one CD in my collection that seems to be enhanced by my car stereo's blown passenger-side speaker). Beyond may never be as influential as the band's acknowledged 80s masterpieces (You're Living All Over Me and Bug), if only because the pleasures of Dinosaur Jr are no longer new and indie-rock is no longer the revolutionary underground force it once was. But in terms of musical accomplishment, it is nearly equal - a totally worthy companion to and continuation of the band's early catalog (which has all been lovingly remastered and reissued in the last few years) and one hell of a good start for the uninitiated.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Beyond" by Dinosaur Jr.
Fat Possum Records
Released 5/1/07
Produced by J Mascis
50 min.
SONGS: Almost Ready - Crumble - Pick Me Up - Back To Your Heart - This Is All I Came To Do - Been There All The Time - It's Me - We're Not Alone - I Got Lost - Lightning Bulb - What If I Knew
1. Almost Ready 3:08 2. Crumble 4:04 3. Pick Me Up 6:32 4. Back to Your Heart 4:30 5. This Is All I Came to Do 5:21 6. Been There All the Time 3:40 7....More at NBC Universal
Although always as loud as God, it was easy to convince yourself the music of Dinosuar Jr. was far more passive than aggressive. This myth exploded in...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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