| J. Masicis & The
Fog - More Light |
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 I
used to be a big fan of Dinosaur Jr., same as a lot of people round
about 1988 when ‘Freakscene’ came out and blew away the
poodlerock cobwebs that confusingly reigned at the time. I remember
seeing them on a show called Snub on BBC2 miming in someones back
garden, frontman J.Mascis looking half asleep in big 70’s shades,
Lou Barlow banging on a Rickenbacker bass through a hedge of hair
and the drummer wearing X-ray specs and shaking a stick with little
rubber skeletons nailed to it. There was also a life sized fisherman
mannequin in a pink sou wester apparently culled from a chip shop
looming in the background. Like the music itself, highly proficient
guitar playing hanging out with almost ridiculously laid back
vocals, it all made a strange kind of sense somehow. A decent album
followed (their third), a degree of success and major label
interest. The latter was said to have brought out an ambitious and
fiscally minded aspect to Mascis’ attitude to the band which
Barlow didn’t much care for. He promptly split, leaving them to
Warner Brothers and a further three uninteresting releases to pursue
his own sound and degree of success with Sebadoh. Dinosaur Jr.
subsequently shuffled off stage left sometime around 1997 and Mascis,
famous for doing nothing much, went on to do nothing much. I once
spotted him in a Matt Dillon film called "Grace Of My
Heart" playing an engineer for a character based on Brian
Wilson of the Beach Boys but that was it. For 3 years.
Then "More Light" came out at the end of 2000. From
nowhere. With J. Mascis on guitars/vocals and Kevin Shields (of My
Bloody Valentine infamy) on everything else and damn it if it
isn’t the best record that any of them has ever done. The first
time I listened to it I thought it was the same as it used to be, as
the obvious ingredients are what strike you at first, the
unpretentious widdly guitar and the drawly rocking chair on the
porch vocals, a reconstituted Dinosaur Jr in everything but name. I
used to be a big fan of Dinosaur Jr. like I said, but the ‘used to
be’ part came when they got to be just the same thing over and
over, like narcoleptic Yngwie Malmsteen record playing forever. So I
wasn’t too impressed initially with "More Light". Then I
lived with it for a few weeks and it’s other ingredients started
to show their flavours, the piano solo on "Where’d You
Go", the Krautrock rumblings of the title track and most
importantly the sense of coolness that Dinosaur Jr./J. Mascis had
seemingly squandered must have been just resting in an offshore
account somewhere because it’s here like it had never been gone.
What sets J. Mascis and The Fog apart from Dinosaur Jr. though is
the strong shift to melodic and, dare I say it, catchy tunes which
take you unawares until you catch yourself going round Tesco humming
"Hey C’mon" and getting dirty looks from old ladies. It
interferes with Pan Pipe Moods Play Barry Manilow on the in-store
radio, they hate that.
So basically I think it’s a great record and one I’ll be playing
regularly for months to come. I’d even go so far as to recommend
it to you, especially if you ever rated Dinosaur Jr. in the early
years before they got bored and then boring. If , however, you ever
rated Yngwie Malmsteen then all I can recommend to you is a nice lie
down in a darkened room or a very hard slap around the head with a
particularly large trout. Now get out of my sight. You disgust me.
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Rating: 8 out of
10
Reviewed by Gordon Peppard
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