First World Problems:
Sorry about the lack of posts...We recently subscribed to Hulu and the only way we can watch it is through the Wii, bu the Wii won't pick up a decent wireless connection for some reason, so we have to plug the Wii directly into the modem...
As a result, the computer is sitting there lifeless while season 253 of America's Next Living Skeleton flickers away on the TV...
Y'see, I'd usually work on the blog while everybody else in the house watched TV, but that's kinda changed now...But I'm working on a solution....
(I have a feeling as time passes the above paragraph will ultimately be the funniest thing on the blog....I imagine it eventually coming across as:
Sorry about the lack of posts...We recently subscribed to America Online but we can't use the World Wide Web and the telephone at the same time...
As a result, my dancing baby GIF is sitting there lifeless...
... as we call Miss Cleo all night...
So let's all agree to reconvene here in 2027 and laugh about the hulu saga...)
Moving on....
Dinosaur Jr: You're Living All Over Me
1987
SST Records
Format I Own it on: Compact Disc
Track Listing: 1. Little Fury Things 2. Kracked 3. Sludgefeast 4.The Lung 5. Raisans 6. Tarpit 7. In a Jar 8. Lose 9. Poledo 10. Just Like Heaven
Damn...I also have the first album but I can't find the actual disc...I seem to just have the cover now...I'll pick up another copy soon so we can revisit that one...Let's just say "Cats in a Bowl," "Forget the Swan" and "Repulsion" rule...
In the meantime, let's check out "You're Living All Over Me"...
For the longest time I had this on cassette and I still think about it in those terms...Despite my current copy being a pristine digitally-perfect compact disc, I can almost hear the squeaky wheel of the cassette deck...When "Raisans" plays. I still expect to hear the damaged two seconds where my old cassette was eaten...
(I spent so much time doing emergency operations on broken cassettes, I honestly feel like I might be qualified to perform brain surgery at this point...Just replace the pencil, scissors, centimeter of scotch tape, and tiny screwdriver with scalpels and forceps and collect the big bucks...)
Eventually I lost the cassette and when I went to replace it, I discovered the album had gone out of print in all formats!! But one glorious day in 2005 Merge Records did the Lord's work and reissued the album...Now a whole new generations can discover this album and hear how influential it was for the whole "alternative rock" thing that quickly followed (Note, I've never met anybody under 30 who listens to Dinosaur Jr, so this "Whole New Generation" I'm referring to is strictly hypothetical)....
While the sound eventually became commonplace, this is one of those albums that I'm sure was pretty startling when it first came out...Imagine a hardcore punk engine with a heroic classic rock chassis... Take "Kracked" for example...After the first verse the rhythm section goes into the obligatory fucking decent HC breakdown but suddenly J Mascis' guitar comes in and he does one of his trademark non-HC virtuoso guitar solos...This was probably a very taboo move back in '87 but the approach has been so thoroughly assimilated into the musical vernacular that it probably just comes across as "90's rock" to the unfamiliar listener...
And I wasn't there in the studio while they were recording it, but I'm going to guess this whole thing was recorded at a fairly punishing volume...Again, going back to "Kracked," the instrumental passages just roar...When the guitar cranks back up after the "I plead the case" section it almost makes your ears ring at even a low volume...Now that's power even if that power is sometimes obscured by J's emotionally vulnerable moan/croak...Another juxtaposition (triple word score) that subsequent generations of musicians took to heart...My favorite moments on the album happen to be the most wounded....""Sludgefeast" and "Tarpit" are giant, swirling, ear-splitting black holes of heartbreak...The band slows things down while cranking shit up:
"Thought I knew you, stuck out my handHow does a band deliver a slow emotional song without it edging into the evil "Power ballad" category? That's how!!! The sentiment hits the right melancholy note while the guitars rip your head off...
You bit, wish I could understand..."
Oh yea, I should probably mention the album's most classic moment..."Little Fury Things" kicks off with a torrential downpour of primal screaming and wah wah guitars before it unexpectedly gets all quietly introspective while J and Lou sing the inscrutable lyrics in unison:
"A rabbit falls away from me, I guess I'll crawl
A rabbit always smashes me, again I'll crawl..."
Are you allowed ton rhyme "crawl" with "crawl"? What do those lyrics even mean? Who cares! It falls into the "inexplicably moving" category, which is always an approach that wins me over...And J always sounds best with Lou singing with him...That's why the whole post -"Bug" breakup was so painful...Oh, and Lou can rock the bass like nobody else...As much as I enjoy them, the bass guitar on any Non-Lou Barlow Dinosaur Jr album always sounds kind of hollow to me, missing his primal and forceful approach...You also get to hear the seeds of early Sebadoh being sown on "Poledo" which is a found-sound musique concrète/4-track confessional hybrid...I've met people who hate it, but it happens to be one of my favorite things on the album...
"You're Living All Over Me" still remains my favorite Dinosaur Jr album...There are a few that come this close to dethroning it, but this one wins on the sheer thrill of discovery...The first album, while it had flashes of their signature sound, often felt like it was searching for something elusive...I think "You're Living All Over Me" is where they found it and can't look away...It's just relentlessly Dinosaur Jr-like...This gets my highest possible recommendation, even if the lyrics to "In a Jar" still gross me out...
Here's "Tarpit" by Dinosaur Jr...Enjoy...
This is probably my second favorite by them. My favorites are Little Fury Things, The Lung and Tarpit. Sludgefest is awesome to. I love the intro for Tarpit. What in the world is the sample in In A Jar? lol I ordered this cd a couple months ago. I found a used copy of the original SST release for a couple bucks so I got it. When I got the cd it was mint so when I opened the case to listen to it it actually had the old SST catalog all folded up in the case! I thought that was pretty damn cool. I think this album and Bug is where they were the tightest. When Lou was gone the stuff was still awesome but it seemed like something was missing. I think its awesome though that they reunited!
ReplyDeleteYea, that's the best when they still have the old catalogs in them...I have a lot of stuff like that...The best is my vinyl copy of Megadeth's "Killing is My Business..." which has a huge old catalog in it...I should scan that in..I think I did the Megadeth post before I found the vinyl copy...I should update that one or just do a new post for it..My favorites are "You're Living All Over Me" "Bug" and "Where You Been?" I play "I Bet on Sky" a lot too...I found the answer for that "In a Jar" sample...It's Lou Barlow and a patient at the Nursing Home he worked at...Oh yea...I'll probably go over this in the Sebadoh posts ten years from now, but I got to meet Lou after a Sebadoh show years back,...He was great...Amy was giving him a hard time and he had a good sense of humor about it...She asked him for the set-list and he said he only had the one, but he would make a new one for her, and he ripped a page out of a book and wrote her a copy of the setlist (which I still have folded up in my copy of "Sebadoh III") ...Then she wanted a shirt and asked if she could have a black one....He brought one over and it looked blue because of the lights in the place and Amy said, "Actually, I wanted a black one..." He says, "This is a black one..." Amy said, "It looks blue..." And he just cracked up and said, "You don't believe me?!?!" He was great..After that I agreed to purchase every album he put out...
ReplyDelete