Album review: Dinosaur Jr – Farm

You can blame Dinosaur Jr for being one of the handful of bands who inspired me to start playing guitar, but with that heinous (yet largely unnoticed) sin left aside, there’s not a lot else on the bad side of their copybook. And while debating exactly who “invented” the loud/quiet dynamic that became a household currency in the grunge era is like trying to trace a fart in a sauna, J Mascis and company would be among the first people you’d call in for the identity parade. Sometimes influential is too weak a word.

Farm is the second album from the original line-up after the long-awaited kiss-and-make-up of a few years back, and it recalls the fuzzy sunny slackerdom of the band’s major label albums of the nineties, albeit with Lou Barlow’s bass dialled back to a slightly less punishing level in the mix. Most artists mellow with time, but it’s more subtle in bands who were pretty mellow to start with; Dinosaur Jr had a knack of turning the classic seventies rock style into warm and melodic pop tunes, and that’s still very much in evidence. The palette of sounds is dead simple: drums, bass and guitar played at maximum volume, with very little in the way of effects beyond the warm crunch of saturated amplifiers. Recent single “Over It” features some wah-wah action on the opening guitar hook, but that’s really pretty much it.

But much as an effects-pedal junkie as myself might like to pretend otherwise, you don’t need countless boxes of tricks to make great music. Farm is such a seemingly effortless album that I’m hesitant to write much about it, because some things really don’t need to be over-analysed. Suffice to say that Dinosaur Jr will always be part of the sound of bitter-sweet youth for me, and that the next time I hear someone describe some gang of young haircuts with a keyboard and a Rockstar energy drinks sponsorship deal as the ultimate loud guitar pop band, I’ll be politely asking them outside to settle it like gentlemen.

I mean, seriously: four chords and some soaring pentatonic solos, loose alt-rock breakbeats from the drums, equal helpings of harmony and melody from the bass, and that oh-so-lazy nasal drawl that Mascis hates having compared to Neil Young’s (even though it’s an obvious comparison to a new listener)… what more could you need from an album? Right now – with the hot weather painting the world in all the remembered hues of wasted teenage summers – I know I couldn’t ask for more. Maybe Dinosaur Jr won’t have that effect on you, but you won’t know until you let them try.