Favorite Dinosaur Jr Studio Album

[Hybridge]

Hey doesitfloat –I like Rude and Recognition also but think Imagination Blind is a killer song and even better song title and that IB and Your Weather sound more of a piece with the whole Farm album whereas the two Lou tunes on I Bet on Sky (both great) sound more like Lou/Sebadoh songs and don’t blend as seamlessly tone/sound-wise with the rest of the album’s songs and so are sort of jarring at least to my ears. I haven’t heard the iTunes version of Farm but will check it out as I’d like to hear Tarpit close, sounds cool.

Hey Empire–As for similar riffs on the same album, I’d guess that this is not a continuity error/coincidence.

e.g. Jefferson Airpane’s Volunteers album opens wih We Can Be Together and closes with Volunteers, which open with the exact same riff, sort of bookending the album. Actually, that riff is the same one that’s in Fairport Convention’s Matty Groves, Quicksilver’s Shady Grove, and the Dead’s St Stephen. Intertextuality is a thing.

[kerbdogma]

Hy Hybridge. You’re talking about Lou’s songs on the last two dinosaurjr.’s. I liked them
at first but they ruin J’s guitar tone, if it were a concept album. I wasn’t there in the days when you couldn’t hear Lou play bass. Maybe Dinosaur was mastered for a Laserdisc? I listened to blue oyster cult laserdisc and someone else’s version (many Black Betty). It’s still ironic after first listened to on mp3 and not hearing the bass. It’s intersting. But is Lou talking about my wall. Filfthy Wall? Pink Floyd’ Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall are real concept albums. Lou’s still a sleigher thpugh.

[Hybridge]

Hey DentDeddies

I doubt Lou is referring to your wall but you’d have to ask him. I just like the phrasing and angularity/anger of the song. I tend to think of his lyrics as probably part of his process of processing/catharsis and leave it at that.

If you want to be addressed by a song for sure check out Neil Young’s Driftin Back:

---

Dreaming about the way things sound now
Write about them in my book
Worry that you can’t hear me now
And feel the time I took

To help you feel this feeling
Let you ride along
Dreaming about the way you feel now
When you hear my song

---

Beauty!!

[empire3]

I like Lou’s tracks and I thought rude acoustic was a better version. He started to cover a few tracks acoustically for youtube recently. I asked him (via his site and twitter) if he ever thought about putting his dino songs out acoustic – he has 10 if you include his version of tarpit (as a download) he never replied so im guessing not! I still think it’s a good idea 🙂

[kerbdogma]

If you want to be addressed by a song for sure check out Neil Young’s Driftin Back:

I see. 🙂 That song is not about me…I wouldn’t want anything about me unless i could get free cars and houses.

[Hybridge]

Hey DentDeddies,

Oh. I didn’t mean to assume; not sure why you wouldn’t be among those addressed by Neil’s lyrics, as he’s specifically addressing the listener/listening state, which is sort of rare.

I had a housemate when I was 18 who had a Neil Young thing. My friend and I needed a place to live and he said we could rent living room space in his basement apartment in Oakland so we did. The only music ever played in the place was Neil Young and associated musicians (Steven Stills, Graham Nash, David Crosby). I grew up listening to my brothers’ Live Rust, Decade, Rust Never Sleeps, etc. records and had seen Neil Young play with the Charlie Daniels band and was a fan in general but listening exclusively to Neil Young 24/7 for 6 months put me off listening to Neil for years. The guy had this whole non-consensus reality built up around Neil, that they were family friends, that he ate dinner with Neil, etc. Maybe he did but the ‘letters from Neil’ that he shared were form letters from management. There were rats in the apartment (that he shot with his air rifle, not kidding) and the tweaker teenager upstairs came down and stole our stuff, so we moved out after six months. The whole house burned down along with the whole neighborhood in the big Oakland hills fire of 1991. I think the rat problem was finally solved by flames.

I didn’t listen to On the Beach for 25 years and I listened to it last summer and I still knew all the words to all the songs, it having been hammered so hard into my brain years ago. Anyway, all this is to say, when I heard Driftin Back last year I thought of my old housemate and was just, “Dude, this is your jam.” It’s an amazing song, lyrically and musically. It’s super meta–a song about listening to songs, and the meditative state that arises from deep drones and drifting back mindfully. You don’t have to read David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish, which is kind of boring (and a little disturbing after seeing David Wants to Fly) to learn about and/or contact meditative/visionary states–listening to Neil’s song takes you there, sort of a how-to tune. No houses or cars, though. 🙂

[kerbdogma]

Hey Hybridge

The only music ever played in the place was Neil Young and associated musicians (Steven Stills, Graham Nash, David Crosby). I grew up listening to my brothers’ Live Rust, Decade, Rust Never Sleeps, etc. records and had seen Neil Young play with the Charlie Daniels band and was a fan in general but listening exclusively to Neil Young 24/7 for 6 months put me off listening to Neil for years.

I don’t really have a thing about the band Dinosaur Jr. They turned my player on at Out There. Seems like they’re just a great rock band. So much so, that I didn’t want to go out and see if there were new bands and tunes. I thought I’d do it anyway. I didn’t buy Neil Young, in fact it has nothing to do with the catwalk shows he played. Isn’t Driftin’ just another form of keeblin’. I don’t have that song my Riken Raptors did that was, as I knew automatically, about me. Yeah and them tires didn’t last long as fuck.

I remember going into J Mascis’ home after we carnated the house of ribbing. Well if he has a fireplace he also has a house. That’s great, SIlva and THO didn’t track him down to build a house without one. The Evil Kite dream. I don’t live here you can still kick out a roommate though 🙂 J oughtta buy Ben and Jerry’s one day. And Bring some to my labor day part 2014.

🙂

Well the track listing on I Bet On Sky is bold. I wouldn’t listen to a song like this if any other band released a track called that.

[Hybridge]

Is the track called that?

This chat has gone a bit afield and your comments have a Joycean ring–we could talk about what bands have used James Joyce in their songs–Jefferson Airplane and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum come to mind–but to tie this all back to the thread, I like the latest Dinosaur Jr albums a lot because they’re mature/developed works, not so much teenage angst etc. and so I can, as a forward-looking 46 year old, relate to them more.

Neil Young and Maigret and Burroughs and Dinosaur Jr overturn the canard that aging equals diminishing. Greendale, Fork in the Road, Psychedelic Pill, and Americana are fantastic albums that equal and even in some ways surpass Neil’s early albums. Burroughs’ space trilogy blows doors on Naked Lunch. I think Beyond etc are better than the Dino jr albums of the 80’s and 90’s. Many bands’ latter works are not as great as their early efforts; I think Neil, Dinosaur Jr and a few other bands go against that tendency and have gotten better and deeper with time, which is a hopeful thing.

I took my kid skateboarding at Venice beach last weekend and on our way back we saw on the marquee of a surf shop a Heidegger quote: “The possible ranks higher than the actual” which resonates a bit with the I Bet on Sky line, I think.

[kerbdogma]

no no. I forgot to mention I know It Oh So Well and Don’t Pretend You Didn’t Know. It sounds like a family talking about another family they don’t even know. haha Never heard a song called That.

I took my kid skateboarding at Venice beach last weekend and on our way back we saw on the marquee of a surf shop a Heidegger quote: “The possible ranks higher than the actual” which resonates a bit with the I Bet on Sky line, I think

That’s funny because after listening to IBOS so many times, I think J’s taken a Take A Run At The Sun. Well I was a skater and still am. Until, you cotton fields and the skateboard breakers. Doesn’t sound like something I’d see on a marquis. Whatever’s on the church Signs is more easily explainable. What does it mean? “The Possible ranks higher than actual”??????

I could imagine what some people were talking about when Free So Free came out. Hey I happened to be here too when J M. and the Fog Free So Free came out. It was the first,
glimpse, into how J did the album. But nothing went wrong really. Why Going To California and Someone Said isn’t the same song, I do not know. The track listings were displayed first without the song, which sounds like something Jeremiah would do. It looked normal even though I’d never had an experience with music.

[empire3]

Click next to your favourite album to register a vote in a poll to see what is the best!

[Hybridge]

Hey DD I’m getting off this bus. Sorry to muddy the thread with extraneous associations. I work with kids with autism and other communication disorders and enjoy gleaning meaning from unintelligible utterances but I’m out of my depth here. Take care and all that.

ps I wouldn’t dream of explaining Heidegger, but on a more trivial yet slightly more relevant literary note I would ask if anyone knows what Shakespeare line appears in a Dinosaur Jr song title.

[kerbdogma]

Hey DD I’m getting off this bus

Alright. If there’s a next Dinosaur Jr album I’ve been growing ivy against a neon Frisbee Throw House and I’d appreciate it if Dino brought cigarettes in 2014. It’d be their best free album cover (though I’d have to charge them to build the shed back) Labor Day Party for Freak scene members seriously? I’m getting on the buss. It’s time to go now.

I’m gonna guess the song is drawerings.

Course, I voted IBOS because of it’s currency. But I don’t think it is the best album.

[empire3]

And with a election (esque) vote count that could easily see Kang with his health care reforms and slavery mandate be elected……
YLAOM wins !
I guess they are all so good on different days with a certain mindset that it’s to hard to pick just one.

[doesitfloat]

would like to hear peoples views on ‘Hand It Over’. for me, it’s my second favourite & if ylaom weren’t so god damn sexy then it’d be my fave album of all time. I know it’s not the album in which people talk about a lot, nor the tracks on it really (beside Alone perhaps?) but I believe it’s one of J’s finest works. maybe because it was going to be the last Dino record, he added a couple of trumpets & more diverse tracks or whatever and I like how he didn’t strive to put a big hit in there like ‘feel the pain’, and kept it simple. i do believe the songs are underrated, the whole album is so hard hitting and powerful, much like many dinosaur records, but there’s something i love about Hand It Over. & when i tell people this they are quite surprised to hear that i love ‘hand it over’ so much out of all of them, and then i get surprised that they don’t love it just as much. i suppose how much you like an album depends on how much you’ve heard of it, and with 10 dino albums to pick from…blah blah blah. basically i like Hand It Over a lot.

also, was the J Mascis + the fog albums meant to be practically the same as the Dinosaur records? because i find them a lot different. (less heavy, less solos, more singing and so on…)

[kerbdogma]

I would ask if anyone knows what Shakespeare line appears in a Dinosaur Jr song title

I’m not sure. In Repulsion I think he mentions a line from the book The Way To Rainy Mountain. I’m curious, if J had any Shakespearean line? What album is it on Hybridge?

I think some of the best Dino songs are on Hand It Over. I remember buying this as one of my first compact disc, found it in a retail store even. I listened to it at work (with Jaime), blasted Alone loud, and wandered about Never Bought It and what it meant. Rambleon mentioned More Light was more of a positive record. I couldn’t agree more.
Seems like Dino took the depressive dip again on the Amma and next Lou/Murph Beyond. There are different pedal effects on More Light.

[Author]

Posts