More Light Review on UBL.COM

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Found this on the UBL Today

jeremiah [img]http://www.freakscene.net/ubb/smilies/13.gif[/img]

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All dinosaurs become extinct at some point, and such was the case with Dinosaur Jr, which succumbed during the great glacial freeze of 1997 — long after it had become a solo vehicle for singer-guitarist J Mascis, anyway. In that spirit, the Fog that shares billing on this post-Dino outing refers not to a specific group, but to the collective he gathered to record More Light: My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, who helped out during one seven-week period of the nine-month recording; Guided by Voices’ Bob Pollard, who shows up on three songs; and a few engineers.
The irony, of course, is that More Light is a perfect fit within the Dinosaur Jr catalog and, in fact, would rank as one of its better entries, a spirited, 11-song outing on which Mascis’ writing and performing sound fresher and more muscular than they have in years, certainly since the early end of the ’90s. Mascis is, at his core, an artist who understands the conventions of craft and melody as well as he knows his way around distortion effects. Over the years, however, he has chosen to wrap all of that in a post-punk battalion of influences such as Sonic Youth, the Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, the Velvet Underground, and Neil Young’s vintage rides with Crazy Horse.

Mascis doesn’t veer far from that path on More Light, either; "Same Day" kicks things off with a dense, fuzzy guitar attack spiced by punchy dramatics and vocal trade-offs with Pollard. "Where’d You Go" sounds like a garage take of Ziggy Stardust, while the anthemic choruses of "I’m Not Fine" take further advantage of Pollard’s presence, and the title track bristles with driving, drag racing energy. Where Mascis does sound more comfortable on More Light is during the restrained numbers; he’s clearly grown into the space and sweetness that he evokes in tracks such as "Ground Me to You," "Waistin," "Ammaring," and "All the Girls," always keeping the fuzz within touching distance but more often letting the songs’ melodic merits carry them. The Backstreet Boys needn’t worry; Mascis is still a little too rough-and-tumble for the mainstream — as evidenced by "Can’t I Take This On," a bona fide hit in wolf’s clothing — but More Light does assure us that the virtues that made him an underground rock icon are still blissfully intact. — Gary Graff

Taken from Source : http://wallofsound.go.com/reviews/stories/jmascisandthefog_morelightIndex.html

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