★★★★☆
J Mascis isn’t a talker – ask the artist about his art and you’re likely to find yourself making a neat turn into a dead end.
Nor is he a therapist – though his music is full of a deeply downplayed kind of heartbreak, he’s seemingly unwilling to offer solutions.
Nor is he a poet, though his lyrics are often filled with poetry. The new Dinosaur Jr album, Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not, is carried by Mascis’ wry wit, and the blunt lines about pain sprinkled across a song like ‘Be A Part’ have all the snub-nosed power of a Charles Bukowski poem. But such asides are beautiful in a way that makes no great claims to beauty, and though ‘Good To Know’ is tragic, it is tragic in a workman-like way – tragic like a slipped disc, not tragic like Shakespeare.
Nor is Mascis a guitarist in the traditional sense, though the solos throughout Give A Glimpse are full of the kind of clean wonder the man has spent decades pinning his reputation upon. He doesn’t play the guitar in the same way that you or I play guitar, and to write about Mascis’ technical skill is, to borrow a quote, akin to dancing about architecture.
No. J Mascis is none of these things. J Mascis is a fucking magician, and Give A Glimpse is magic.
Dinosaur Jr.’sGive A Glimpse Of What Yer Notis out now throughJagjaguwar/Inertia.
