Dinosaur Jr.

According to the Hegelian tongue-twister, philosophy would be the activity that sets itself before itself in order to be for itself, and in this other from itself arrive only at itself. If such a definition strikes you as bloated, indigestible, meaningless – also for its hammering repetitions: the same things could be said in a much simpler, more civil way – then "You're Living All Over Me" will strike you as overloaded, indigestible, meaningless.

Just like this sentence, Dinosaur Jr.’s Dinosaur Jr. “You're Living All Over Me” needs, in order not to come across as overloaded, to be weighed in proper proportion. And in order not to come across as indigestible, it needs to be taken in either by strong stomachs or in moderate portions. And in order not to slide into meaninglessness, it ultimately requires accepting that even an end in itself can be a meaning – if not, where the universe and life are concerned, THE meaning.

Don’t believe it? Try handling the 10 tracks of “You're Living All Over Me” any other way; try, as they say, to get a handle on them; to find their head and tail; some kind of continuity; to make out anything at all, within a single track and between one track and the next. Try to catalogue – or to get excited about – “Little Fury Things”, the opening track that only after dozens of listens might strike you as glorious, without, consciously or not, going through some stage of the process I’ve just outlined and tried to formalize.

It’s precisely for this reason that “You're Living All Over Me” – for all the conceptual framing it demands and for the fact that it gives you nothing, in terms of emotion or satisfaction, without that framing – must be considered one of the most avant-garde works in rock. Rock that fully hits the mark with just three instruments – and avant-garde that expresses itself in a noise worn down and exacerbated by a voice and a rhythm section that are never cathartic, never squared-off, never at rest, and which therefore give not the slightest breathing room and likewise strain and prevent any parceling-out of the magma. Magma that then springs from a source that is entirely intimate; overflowingly intimate. It really is a disemboweled adolescent chest vomiting lava of daydreaming, incomprehension and stupor. It’s “Kracked”. And we’re only on the second track; where Mascis’s guitars tear through, tearing themselves apart in the process; where it’s proven that these, alone, set the weather conditions for the whole suffocated – yet flavorful – world of “You're Living All Over Me”.

It would then be foolish to frame “Sludgefeast” between Melvins and Meat Puppets: this is music that seeks no reference points but which, again, wants to and manages to be self-sufficient, and Mascis’s wail doesn’t stand for any failure, expressive or existential. It is instead a reified wail. It’s the attempt to turn into a thing, an object, a subjective state of mind that thus becomes, in the metamorphosis, monstrous – and demoralizing for the listener who can’t do the same. “The Lung” quivers with whirlwinds, tempo changes and layers of guitar. At intervals some riff dodges the formless to reduce itself to the bare bones of a watery melody, immediately torn apart by clusters of noise. The vocals: knowing English is pointless, because knowing what he says is pointless; he doesn’t say, he sings; or rather, chants; he functions as atmospheric instrumentation.

“Raisans” – though the same could be said of the other tracks, each one a variation on the theme of the other, where the theme, however, is something along the lines of dreamlike formlessness – censors itself and, rejecting it for being too abstract and impervious, doesn’t constitute the prototype of that quiet-loud-quiet grunge that would only emerge from the hyper-simplifying dilution of ultra-concentrated ideas: a continuous stream of ideas competing to outdo one another. As in this track, which in three minutes lays out what progressive rock encyclopedias fail to achieve.

So far on “You're Living All Over Me” there’s not a second wasted, not a second too many; no self-indulgence, but plenty of honesty, tightly bound to a quality matched but never surpassed in rock. That honesty and quality will be matched by those towering examples of rock, Fugazi and Shellac, on albums that will filter, in the slow motion of more mature reflection, the unreserved kinetic flow of “You're Living All Over Me”.

“Tarpit” kicks off the second half of the album. And it’s something of a letdown. With the uncompromising avant-gardism of the five opening tracks partly set aside, the tempos stretch out, the melody surfaces, and the state of despondency it conveys becomes explicit, redeemed only by a wished-for beauty.

“In A Jar” cleverly reframes as play – its rhythm really is playful – what was apocalyptically expressed in the five flawless opening tracks. Then, in an increasingly brutal progression, even this episode spills over into ferocity. The ferocity of a wildcat. With claws that are entirely mental.

“Lose” gets you drunk on towering riffs before whipping itself into a furious chorale that could well mark the true endpoint of an album that still includes the rather pointless mumblings of “Poledo” and the naive pronouncements of “Show Me The Way”, which, fitting though it is in the album’s economy – to calm things down and offer a human breather – is nonetheless guilty of leaving behind a gratuitous sense of foolishness.

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29/05/2011