album // Fossils
Fossils is a US-only compilation of 'Previously
Released Singles' released on SST, Dinosaur Jr.'s
Stateside label at the time, which was run by Black Flag's
Greg Ginn. J Mascis' brother Mike supplies the cover
art, which feaures a toussled-headed toy troll with a safety pin
through its squashed noise.
'Little Fury Things' features a veritable howl of
a guitar section courtesy of J Mascis and an almost contradictory
melodic vocal; at times, during the more 'sensitive' sections, you'd
swear that The Cure's Robert Smith was playing the guitar section.
There is a guest on this track, as it happens - Sonic Youth's
Lee Ranaldo, who supplies backing vocals. Ranaldo has a very
distinctive vocal, but you'll just have to accept the assertion
that he's on this song, because the muddy mix makes it near impossible
to hear him. 'In A Jar' is a more straightahead punk-infected tune
featuring a prominent bassline from Lou Barlow and a lyric
from Mascis that runs 'It's hard to stomach the gore'. The
track is frantic, and is punk in the spirit of Sonic Youth,
finding melody between the maelstrom of distortion. Oddly enough,
the track appears to be sung from the perspective of a cute pet,
who watches a girl regularly self-abusing. It's actually quite a
serious piece of writing from these guys - so much for slackerdom.
In comparison, the cover of Peter Frampton's 'Show
Me The Way' is a shambling pop number featuring a leaden beat from
Murph and a semi-falsetto vocal from J. Sadly no vocodered
guitar, but a great wah-wah section nonetheless. 'Freak Scene',
the slacker anthem of all time by a good country mile, follows in
its undiminished disjointed splendour. 'Keep The Glove' is a pretty,
melodic countrified tune, with J singing in a style which must have
surely provided the blueprint for Lou Barlow's Sebadoh side
project; there's a great, ghostly distorted riff at the end too.
The cover version of The Cure's 'Just Like Heaven'
is, according my friend and Cure authority Neil Cullimore, Robert
Smith's favourite cover version of one of his own songs. It builds
layers of guitars upon one another, the uppermost being subjected
to a very quirky 'wobbly' effect. There's also a very noisy section
which goes right over the levels featuring grungy guitars and extremely
distorted vocals. It ends so abruptly, literally mid-word, leaving
the sense that someone pressed stop too enthusiastically when they
mastered it. 'Throw It Down' is a lesson in acoustic brevity, a
polite little track with some echoing slide guitar.
Closing track, a cover of Last Rights' 'Chunks',
is something of a surprise, a full-on, staightforward thrash-punk
number that veers murderously close to metal, particularly given
its indecipherable throat-shredding vocal performance. It rounds
off a brief, but essential, selection of early Dinosaur Jr. material
- well worth checking out.
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