Dinosaur Jr.: You're Living All Over Me

It's many, many years since I took this out and gave it a spin. I remember being quite excited about it at the time, and I saw Dinosaur Jr. a couple of times. The first time was at the Take 2 club on Staniforth Road, where I think they were quite good. That must have been about 1989. The second time was 1992, by which time the Take 2 no longer existed, and Sheffield Arena, which didn't exist in 1989 had sprouted — no, monster-marrowed — about 200 yards away from Staniforth Road. Dinosaur Jr. played there as part of Jesus and Mary Chain's Rollecoaster tour, along with Blur and My Bloody Valentine. They were terrible that night, as though they were scared they couldn't fill such a big space, so they just turned everything up and fluffed it

After I put this on yesterday morning, I couldn't work out why I'd once got so worked up about it. Like Black Sabbath with less strangled vocals — by no means a bad thing, but not remarkable either. Then it struck me that my recollection of being excited was an overstatement. The record — the original SST nine-track release — still has its cellophane cover, and I never bought another of their albums.

Then I spotted on Wikipedia that allmusic gave the album 5 stars, and their review provides a historical context that I'd forgotten:

A blitzkrieg fusion of hardcore punk, Sonic Youth-style noise freak-outs, heavy metal, and melodic hard rock in the vein of Neil Young, You're Living All Over Me was a turning point in American underground rock & roll. With its thin, unbalanced mix, the album sounds positively menacing and edgy…It established guitar heroics as a part of indie rock, bringing the noise of Sonic Youth into more conventional song structures.

So that's what we have to thank Dinosaur Jr. for: making it OK for indie kids to enjoy guitar solos again, after a decade of abstention; and preparing the ground for Neil Young's rehabilitation in critical and popular standing. Cheers.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm Listen to this album in full at We7