33 1/3 Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me (BOK)
This is an in-depth study of the visceral slacker classic from 1987, an album that influenced enormously the nascent alternative scene. Dinosaur Jr, the stereotypical slackers. Mascis, Barlow, Murph (just Murph): three early-twenty somethings still overburdened by a torpid adolescence and a disastrous dress sense.
With battered guitar, bass, and kit, they carry around a catalogue of songs that betrays identities half-formed at best, schizoid at worst. But listen. "1987", a new album, a snapshot of a moment when a furious musical intensity swung upwards and pushed their lyrics and Mascis' vocal whine far into the margins. Searing riffs, mountainous solos, and the tightest of fills - underpinned by stream-of-consciousness structures and a palette of crazed effects - steal the show. These three build a one-off sound that stirred up the hardening alternative mainstream and drove it to distraction. "You're Living All Over Me": supposedly Mascis' indictment of what it was like to tour in a van with these other two misfits, but also testimony to the obsession - an itch, a disease - that the band's disengagement from their world had produced.