Weirdness Flows: The Songs of Dinosaur Jr (121-130)

   

130 Turnip Farm

B-side to Start Choppin (1993)

It’s not that there’s a huge amount wrong with ‘Turnip Farm’. It’s heavy and intense, features some nicely bluesy soloing and has a certain dreamy quality. But there’s a lack of focus to it; it feels like a germ of a good idea here that hasn’t quite been realised. Around the minute mark, for example, it sounds poised to take off… but then it just doesn’t go anywhere particularly special. If you were being uncharitable, you might say it sounds like an AI-generated Dinosaur Jr song. But it’s probably fairer to say that it’s no more than a perfectly acceptable b-side.

 

129 Over Your Shoulder

Without A Sound (1994)

Decent enough album track of the morose, mid-tempo variety, with a suitably uplifting chorus. It doesn't quite soar as you hope it might, but there’s some agreeable guitar work to help it along, most notably the piercing opening to the final solo at 3:18.

 

128 Quest

Dinosaur (1985)

Disjointed and astringent, with lots of shifts in tempo and dynamics; the fact that it barely hangs together in any sort of coherent whole is a big part of its charm. Another is the engagingly surreal lyric: ‘I love the caterpillars / munching on the leaves… bugs have feelers just like me.’

127 And Me

Sweep It Into Space (2021)

Poppy track driven by a vigorously strummed acoustic that's very reminiscent of The Cure’s ‘In Between Days’ – there’s a touch of Robert Smith in the lyric too, for example the opening line. There are two tidy, brief solos that, as Daniel Sylvester not unreasonably comments, are ‘such… textbook J Mascis… that you swear [they’re] pulled note for note from an older track’. The prominent 'my love' refrain gives the impression of an unremarkable, straightforward love song, but there are interesting hints of self-loathing and regret ('I can't get the help', 'several lives misspent'). Perhaps a little flimsy, but cute, concise and energetic nonetheless.

 

126 Severed Lips 

Dinosaur (1985)

A ragged, lazy strum topped with a winningly off-hand vocal and a couple of laid-back solos. The generally affable tone is offset by a, shall we say, intimate lyric: ‘I never knew a rubber doll would be so hard to please… One last burst before I retract… can't you see / You're better than my pillow / ‘cause you don't stain so easily.’

 

125 Hide 

Where You Been (1993)

An engaging thrash, full of thunderous urgency - although it lacks focus, like it’s the product of a few interesting ideas that don’t quite integrate. A good song in search of a few elements that might have made it a great one.

 

124 Gettin' Rough

Hand It Over (1997)

One of the admirable qualities about Hand It Over is its experimentation and exploration of different sounds. Here, we get a spot of banjo, which drives the song in a jaunty and energetic fashion and forms a nice counterpoint to J’s mostly drawled vocal. The falsetto parts are just about on the right side of the painfully wavering / endearing line. It’s brevity (it barely makes it over the two-minute mark) is a wise choice: endearingly quirky though it is, it could quickly have become a bit much.

 

123 I Ain't

Sweep It Into Space (2021)

Sweep It Into Space’s opener is an effective blend of crunchy power chords and hooky vocal melody undercut with understated soloing. There’s little depth to the lyric (‘I can't take it / can't quite place it’) but the tune has sufficient verve to make this forgivable.

 

122 On The Brink

Without A Sound (1994)

A busy, intricate shuffle that - like so many others - benefits from the contrast between the frenetic instrumentation and J’s bleary ‘just woken up’ vocals. The guitar solo brings to mind that bright, fuzzy tone deployed by the Isley Brothers in the early 70s.

 

121 N Say

Sweep It Into Space (2021)

Like ‘I Ain’t’, a Sweep song with crisp riffing and a memorable hook to the melody, but this scores a little higher as there’s a little more zest and energy about it. Has a superior (if concise) solo as well.

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