Dinosaur Sr.

Indie rock veterans only getting better with age

It’s been years since Dinosaur Jr. got a fair shake.

Back in the late ’80s the band put out three albums of epoch-defining indie rock but when bass player Lou Barlow was booted out it became the default talking point for both Dinosaur Jr. and Barlow’s new project Sebadoh. When people weren’t harping on the spilt they tended to focus on guitarist J Mascis’s virtuosic playing. By the end of the ’90s Mascis retired the Dinosaur Jr. moniker altogether but by that point all anyone could talk about was how difficult he was to interview.

In 2005 by some miracle the acrimony was swept aside and Dinosaur Jr. bounced back from extinction with its original lineup including drummer Emmett Murphy III (a.k.a. Murph). The trio released Beyond in 2007 but all anyone talked about was the fact that the band was back together. There was curiosity about how it happened and speculation about how long it would last but more often than not the topic of the band’s music was put on the back burner or ignored altogether.

That’s likely to change now that the band has released Farm an epic flashback to the guitar rock of college radio gone by. The reunion is old news the breakup even older which means for the first time in a long time an album by Dinosaur Jr. is being judged on its musical merit rather than the circumstances surrounding it. That’s not to say that this history didn’t influence the recording; it’s just less significant than the end result. Even longtime fans were surprised by such a strong followup in only two years but as it turns out no one was more surprised than the band.

“I just didn’t know if J was up for it” says Barlow. “ Beyond was cool. I thought it was great that he did that but I didn’t think that he would be able to regenerate so quickly and right away. Here we go. Here’s 12 songs. Here’s 12 riffs with drum parts. Let’s go. He might have even been writing them as we went along because he would come in with a new demo every day.”

With that remark Barlow’s reverence for Mascis as a musician and collaborator is clear. It also supports the popular theory that for all intents and purposes Dinosaur Jr. is the J Mascis show. That certainly held true for many of the band’s releases in the ’90s but Barlow’s newfound confidence is starting to change things.

“I think in theory J would like it to be less of his show” he says. “I’ve been in a lot of bands and had a lot of intimate — I hate to say relationships because that would imply sex. Band relationships can be quite intimate. You really get to know people if you are going to write songs with them and collaborate with them. It’s a very fragile thing. And I think with J I’m slowing coming into my own in the band in asserting my opinions but it’s not easy. And I think in some ways we function best as J’s band. At the same time the thing I like about this reunion is that we kind of seem like we are evolving in some way — at least personally and how we deal with each other and how the music is made. There is a movement which is very slow compared to other relationships I’ve had but it’s persistent.”

There’s a certain irony that Barlow terms the evolution of Dinosaur Jr. as slow when its music is so decidedly propulsive. While some of the band’s songs have the lumbering gait of the animal they are named for the handle better describes the sheer size of its sound and ferocious delivery. That love-it-or-get-out-of-the-way esthetic continues in full force on Farm . The mammoth guitar tones are implausibly full the solos are seemingly ceaseless and the songs are so massive you would never guess that Dinosaur is only a three-piece. Not surprisingly the key to such riotous results is volume.

“That was part of the thing in the beginning” says Barlow. “He [Mascis] had the idea that we were going to be louder than hell. That was it. The very first practice we had he had earplugs in and gun muffs over top of that.”

Call it a return to form or falling back into old habits. Barlow says Farm built on the strengths of what the band experienced on their reunion tour but he also admits that musically his mindset isn’t far from where it was almost 20 years ago. That’s why when you listen to Farm there’s no doubt that it’s Dinosaur Jr. There is no other band that sounds like this. That in itself is a bit surprising. Any band this universally respected this critically lauded and with such a distinct sound usually has a few imitators no matter how pale.

“I don’t think people really know how we play” says Barlow. “I’ve had people literally come up to me after the show and say ‘Did you even play the bass?’ I’ve had musicians go ‘Did you hit the strings at all?’ I play bass like a guitar and it creates this kind of thing with J’s thing and I think people just attribute it to J. They just don’t know where it’s coming from.”