Is “The Ecstatic” the first essential album of the Obama Age?

Depending on whether you’re willing to count TV on the Radio’s Dear Science (a record that strikingly captured the spirit of the age, though it was technically released before Obama was elected), I think the answer could very well be yes. If it seems like I’ve been writing about this album a lot, it’s because I’ve been listening to it a lot, and while that obviously has quite a bit to do with the music– the charmingly ragged, off-the-cuff nature of it, how it feels so natural and organic, the way its twilit haziness is warm and inviting rather than cold or alienating– it also has a lot to do with the words: What Mos Def has made here is a hip-hop album of uncommon depth and substance, one that caresses timely issues not through the lens of politics, but through spirituality and compassion.

I’ve come across a couple of bloggers who have struck close to the heart of what the record is all about. The Grain summarizes what makes it so special, and what makes it an essential encapsulation of 2009’s zeitgeist:

The Ecstatic feels like a return to the fold for Mos Def, coming off like Obama’s America and its re-engagement with the rest of the globe following recent ostracism. Mos has emerged from his own obstinate insularism to embrace the world. Its in the production of the record as much as anywhere else, with a heavy (middle) eastern imprint throughout.
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The lyrics plot a complimentary path to this new awareness, the tone set with the Malcolm X sample that opens the record ( “I, for one, will join with anyone, don‘t care what colour you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth”). Overt political statements and specifics are largely avoided though, with the exception of Slick Rick’s 12 bar adaptation of his classic rhyme pattern into an Iraq story on ‘Auditorium’ (‘lookin’ at me curious a young Iraqi  kid/carrying laundry, what’s wrong G hungry?/ No, give me my oil or get fuck out my country’). This is to the benefit of the record (particularly following Mos Def’s apparent penchant for supporting conspiracy theories), instead favouring more suggestive lyrics, highlighting the tension between the pessimism and optimism of the moment. Mos offers no easy answers, emphasising only survival.

For every line highlighting contemporary fears (‘you feel it in the street people breathe without hope/they’re goin through’ the motion’) there is a sanguine statement to embrace the moment (‘peace before everything, God before anything/love before anything, real before everything’; ‘hatred, love and war, and more and more and more and more/and more of less than ever before, it’s just too much more for your mind to absorb/It’s scary like hell, but there’s no doubt, we can’t be alive in no time but now’ ). Mos certainly sounds reinvigorated, even when his distinctive timbre slips into his half sung/half spoken intonation that began to cloud releases post Black on Both Sides.

The Ecstatic delivers what I have been crying out for, a hip hop album that seems relevant to the times without the forced political shtick or the gimmickry of others who have attempted to encapsulate this moment. It is cautiously optimistic, newly aware of the world outside, and slightly claustrophobic, reflecting contemporary complexities. It’s a welcome relief to have an album that touches on the social and  political without leaving you feeling like you have been sledgehammered in the face with simplified, and often disgustingly naïve, pseudo political commentary. This is a hip hop record that is very much of this juncture in history, of re-engagement, observation and globalisation, and for once it works.

Meanwhile, Gavin Breeden– who has named the album his favorite from the first half of 2009– highlights not just the record’s timeliness and its eloquence, but also its spiritual perspective:

Just as he did in 1999, Mos Def has created a perfect record to sum up a decade and prepare us for moving into the next one. On “Life in Marvelous Times,” which in many ways functions as the center piece for the record, Mos Def sums up an entire decade with just a couple lines: “And we are alive in amazing times/delicate hearts, diabolical minds/revelations, hatred, love, and war…It’s just too much for your mind to absorb.” These words appear over a killer beat and a synth line that could be in any number of horror films and it all falls together to create a perfect song. And Mos Def is spot on with his description of the days we live in. When the history books record this decade they’ll likely focus on the awful, horrific events, but Mos Def reminds us that the good is always mixed in with the bad. Love and war will always exist side by side in this world. And adding another dose of wisdom, he concludes the song with “It’s scary like hell, there’s no doubt/But we can’t be alive in no time but now.”

And here we catch a glimpse of The Ecstatic’s purpose. It’s not to warn us like he did on Black on Both Sides, its to encourage us, to lift us up. Mos Def turns our attention to mysteries, “signs and wonders,” and revelations here.

I love both of these reviews. And I love this record. It’s one of the few records I’ve heard that can almost be called necessay.

Bibio: “Ambivalence Avenue”

This is one of the greatest values of indie music: Relatively free from considerations of commerce and convention, indie allows us to consider musical history in a different, often weirder, and occasionally purer light. At its best, it simultaneously expands our understanding of a given style or movement while turning everything we think we know on its head. Take Fleet Foxes: They essentially channel The Band’s rustic Americana into something more free-flowing  and less bound by typical song structures, allowing us to consider the sound of the music anew. TV on the Radio re-imagines vintage Prince in a post-Radiohead setting. Arcade Fire captures all of U2’s bombast, but with a raggedness and a scruffiness that have eluded Bono and Co. since the War days.

There’s great freedom there, in the chance to play with history and tradition, and a man called Bibio knows that. In fact, on his new album Ambivalence Avenue, he does all of the above artists one better, at least as far as genre-bending, indie-fied music theory goes: On his Warp debut, he does nothing less than redefine what “folk” music really means, opening the umbrella further and further to include hip-hop and AM radio funk.

It’s a neat trick that allows Bibio to play into many current indie fads while also demonstrating a deeper sense of musical history than most indie cats are capable of, and also bridging the gap between indie pop and experimental hip-hop. His method is simple: He considers all of this music to be on a level playing field, treating different genres as if they were all cut from the very same cloth. He moves seamlessly from dreamy indie pop to wah-wah funk, from finger-picked 60s-style folk to oddball hip-hop workouts, and the transitions never seem jarring, but, rather, always feel natural, to the point that the whole record flows together like a seamless suite. That’s because Bibio doesn’t flaunt the fact that he’s made one of the year’s most eclectic albums; actually, he downplays it by focusing on what links these styles together, bridging folk and pop with shared harmonic features, showing how instrumental hip-hop can bear the same wistfulness and nostalgia as a minor-key, front-porch ballad.

Pitchfork music critic Brian Howe was moved to invoke J Dilla’s name in discussing Bibio’s work, as a way of highlighting the precision with which Bibio constructs his songs; indeed, the comparison is apt, for even when he’s not working in a straightforward hip-hop idiom here, the artist brings a particularly hip-hop sensibility to the way he constructs his recordings, almost as if they were DJ tracks as opposed to indie folk or pop songs. And that goes back to the way the man plays with the concept of folk music: He knows how to reduce a song to its individual pieces and then build it back up again in odd or exciting new ways, and he knows how to employ familiar signifiers– like the wah-wah pedal in “Jealous of Roses,” which will remind you of any number of vintage R&B and soul cuts– to stake out musical and emotional terrain, just as he’s able to take bits and pieces of various genres and put them together into something that sounds familiar and fresh at the same time, as on the title cut and “Haikuesque.”

That this is Bibio’s Warp debut is fitting, as well: Warp is the label home of one of 2009’s other big indie stars, Grizzly Bear, and Ambivalence Avenue both plays into current indie fascinations as well as one-ups them. The hazy, nostalgic vibe that haunts Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest lends its spectral presence to this album, as well, but where Grizzly Bear’s work is sometimes so atmospheric as to be ephemeral, Bibio anchors his work by balancing his wistfulness with a sense of mischief; there’s no missing the excitement and playfulness in the instrumental hip-hop deconstruction of “Fire Ant.” By the way, there might even be some Animal Collective in here as well, particularly in the more primal moments, and in how Bibio plays it loosey-goosey with genre rules; it’s actually much more eclectic than Animal Collective, too, though not as ambitious or epic in scale.

It’s an album more about sound than song– indeed, it resembles a large tapestry more than it does a collection of individual tracks– but, oddly, Bibio makes that work better than most are able to; he sustains a consistent mood and a continuous sound throughout the record, even as he eases from one style to the next. As a result, the album is both immaculately crafted and surprisingly warm, a very small, compact record that’s bursting with life and ideas; it both embodies and expands our ideas of what folk art is, and as such it’s a wonderfully unique, perhaps even essential listen.

Jazz Round-Up: Christian McBride; Dave Douglas; Carl Allen & Rodney Whitaker

So much jazz, so little time. I wish I could write more about all three of these fine new releases, but for now, here are some quick hits.

Christian McBride – Kind of Brown

Given the status of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue as the more-or-less undisputed, essential jazz album of all time, Christian McBride’s punny wordplay for the title of his Kind of Brown is nothing if not audacious. But if the celebrated bassist doesn’t quite achieve the same level of sheer inspiration and effortless grace of Davis’ seminal work– who ever could?– he at least captures something of its cool, collected confidence. Kind of Brown is a jazz album of unforced, laid-back charisma, the kind of jazz that’s fun to listen to, that simply feels good: McBride and his band bring a light touch and a sense of playfulness to everything here, be it the easygoing swing of “Rainbow Wheel,” the Herbie Hancock-ish groover “Starbeam,” or the straight-ahead bop of “Stick and Move.” This is a classically-minded jazz recording that takes its cues from 60s Blue Note material, but is eclectic and far-reaching in its assembly of different moods and idioms from within that basic framework. And if it rarely swings as hard as some might like it to, its charms lie more in its relaxed demeanor and the ease with which these terrific players gell together.

Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy – Spirit Moves

Few modern-day jazz musicians are as creatively restless and unwaveringly eclectic as Dave Douglas– Don Byron and Herbie Hancock are the only names that immediately come to mind– so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the great trumpeter and bandleader follows up his excellent Moonshine with an album that is, in many ways, its polar opposite. Where Moonshine was a sleek, cool affair, Spirit Moves is warm and pleasingly ragged; and where Moonshine was a decidedly contemporary affair, heavily involved in DJ sampling and post-production work, this new one is agreeably old-timey and traditional. Specifically, it pays homage to the late Lester Bowie, whose aesthetic preferences are mirrored by Douglas’ own choice to leave the Keystone band behind for this one and work with an all-brass group, fittingly titled Brass Ecstasy. The players all sound great, and the meshing of all that brass makes this a much warmer, more organic sound than the chilly sounds of Moonshine. It’s also, in many ways, a much simpler affair– there aren’t as many knotty solos or left-field surprises as the last album– but it’s hardly boring, as Douglas and his group slyly work in everything from an upfront tribute to Bowie to influences of everything from New Orleans jazz to Memphis soul. All in all, it’s another delightful surprise from one of jazz’s most consistently delightful and surprising figures.

Carl Allen & Rodney Whitaker – Work to Do

There’s a lot of love on this one: In the liner notes, drummer Allen and bassist Whitaker speak both of their upbringing in the Baptist church and their love of mainstream pop and R&B, and those influences proudly inform Work to Do, a collaborative effort that incorporates pop songs and gospel overtones without ever sounding like anything other than good old-fashioned jazz. In fact, it might be a bit too old-fashioned for some– some of the more straightforward jazz moments, like the standard “A Time for Love,” don’t offer anything too surprising– but there are some terrific, creative moments in their readings of the Isley Brothers-penned title cut and an imaginative version of “Eleanor Rigby.” But the draw for this album is simply in its warmth, not just between the musicians but toward the material, which make this album feel very personal and grounded– and, ultimately, a lot of fun, as well.

Moby: “Wait for Me”

The cover of Moby’s latest album, Wait for Me, is quite unlike any of his previous album covers. It differs from most of his album artwork in that it’s one of the rare Moby cover images that doesn’t prominently feature the artist’s own bald, bespectacled head. In that regard, it bears a superficial similarity to the image adorning Last Night, but in most other respects it’s entirely different from that one, as well; gone are the glitzy, Photoshopped glamor models and garish colors of that album sleeve, and in their place is a simple, mostly black-and-white doodle that the artist drew himself.

Within those two observations you can essentially find the heart of Wait for Me: An abandonment of ego, a return to simplicity, a certain spiritual purity and childlike sense of contentment. Those elements not only make this his richest and most sophisticated work since Play, but also the most striking and different. It’s quiet, leisurely in tempo, gradual in its steady-handed unfolding. In other words, this is a Moby album that probably won’t serve as the soundtrack to any car commercials or action movies: This is a mournful and somber work, more appropriate for reflection and meditation.

Sad though it may be, however, this music isn’t gloomy. Actually, there’s a certain cleansing, cathartic quality to it, embodying a quality of spiritual renewal that just might reflect the artist’s own coming to contentment. It’s been ten years since Play went multiplatinum, and that decade has seen every single track from that album licensed to commercials or movies, while Moby himself continues to labor over relatively aimless, creatively dry records that neither sold as well nor spoke so vividly as Play. And maybe he’s finally okay with that: With Wait for Me, he’s abandoned any aims to replicate past successes, instead making an album of artistic and spiritual purity that finds serenity and peace even in its darkest moments.

Ironically, settling down and making music that’s as contemplative and honest as this results in Moby returning to a few of the characteristics that made Play so alluring. The title of that album summed up its spirit of curiosity perfectly, and it fits this record, too; it may not be “playful” in the same way that Play was, but it certainly carries itself with a sense of wonderment and wide-eyed joy, even if it is a joy in the midst of grieving. The bluesy samples that gave Play its heart and its spirituality are back, as well: Snippets of gospel songs and spirituals are repeated throughout the album, not only giving it its roots but also illuminating the themes born in the music, with universal signifiers of journeying and overcoming serving as verbal expressions of the music’s sense of perseverance, its hope in the face of turmoil.

But what makes it stick– and indeed, what characterizes the very best of Moby’s music– is that the samples aren’t tacked on to hammer home his philosophical point of view, but rather to enrich and enhance the music, which speaks loudly and clearly on its own, samples or no. (Indeed, over half of the album is totally wordless.) As a composer, Moby has grown substantially without losing his hunger; the tracks here are almost as indebted to classical music as to techno in the strictest sense, and the whole record feels much more immersive and natural than most of what’s played in clubs. But of course, making music for the clubs wasn’t Moby’s ambition, at least not this time, and the result is an album that’s not just very fine, but moving and meaningful as well.

Wilco: “Wilco (The Album)”

When a fifteen year-old band decides to make their seventh studio LP a self-titled affair, it’s time to sit up and pay attention: They’re trying to tell you something. Often, the self-titled album is meant to serve as a sort of statement of identity, a way for the band to say, “This is who we are now.” At times, it marks a fresh start– a back-to-basics approach after a period of aimlessness or excess. Other times, it’s simply a consolidation of strengths, an effort on the band’s part to highlight what they’re good at and smooth over their weak spots.

Wilco’s seventh album isn’t quite self-titled, however; the name of the record is Wilco (The Album), a goofy but fun moniker that kinda-sorta falls into the self-titled camp, but not really. Fittingly, then, the album is kinda-sorta a statement of purpose and identity for Wilco, but not really.

Certainly, it’s a reflection of who the band is and where they’re at in 2009, fifteen years after they founded in the wake of the late Uncle Tupelo. But to say that it’s a deliberate effort on Jeff Tweedy and Co.’s part to sum up the essence of Wilco for us suggests that Wilco has an essence, an identity, which is just about the one thing they’ve never quite had. The number of stylistic shifts the band has gone through is exceeded only by the number of incarnations the band’s line-up has had– I’m pretty sure this is the first Wilco album to bear the same roster as its predecessor– so to say that The Album is a statement of purpose or vision suggests a level of self-awareness and focus that has always seemed just beyond their reach.

The album, then, is less a statement than a revelation– a testimony to just how all-over-the-map the group really is, and just how scatterbrained their music can be. And honestly, that’s a little refreshing: Chicago music critic Jim DeRogatis has already pointed out that this is the first Wilco album that isn’t driven by some sort of narrative– it’s simply a collection of songs– and so while it may be a hodgepodge, it’s also the band’s most modest and unassuming record ever, and as such it has more than a few small, simple pleasures.

But a hodgepodge it remains: Rather than sounding like Wilco’s manifesto, it sounds like what happens when Wilco isn’t quite sure where to go next, and so it incorporates many familiar sounds from the band’s past. There’s some of the laid-back, classic-rock jamming of Sky Blue Sky, a bit of noodling weirdness that recalls A Ghost is Born, and some of the more straightforward pop of the band’s early days. Ultimately, what the record reveals is not what Wilco is, but what they could be; they’ve always wanted to be a pop band at heart– those instincts creep through even amidst the murk of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, via the direct melody of “Kamera” and the soulful swagger of “Hummingbird”– and The Album is their most populist record yet, something that is, in theory, fun to simply put on and play.

It doesn’t always work out that way: “You and I,” Tweedy’s duet with Leslie Feist, is a boring folk ditty that’s destined to be a big hit in Starbucks locations everywhere; “Country Disappeared” tries to be rousing but is instead flat and sleepy; “I’ll Fight” is a by-the-numbers classic-rock joint that justifies the “Dad-rock” label some critics have slapped on the band.

At times, the band strikes out for more adventurous ground, but even that seems indicative of the album’s problems. “Wilco (The Song)” opens the album with crunching power pop chords, and proves that the band doesn’t know when to let a good joke die. Its self-referential lyrics are meant to serve as a sort of lighthearted theme song for the band, and for the album, but it’s goofy and repetitive, and its jokey mood doesn’t square well with the rest of the record. Speaking of which, Tweedy’s lyrics are all over the place: I think “Country Disappeared” is supposed to be a political song, but it’s too lethargic to amount to much. Most of the lyrics are more personal, and some of them are really good– “One Wing” and “Deeper Down” both display a knack for storytelling and metaphor,” for example. “You Never Know,” however, boasts one of Tweedy’s all-time clunkiest opening lines: “Come on, children, you’re acting like children!”

Make no mistake: There are some real gems here. “One Wing” builds gradually from a quiet folk song to a soaring, arena-ready anthem, and it’s a terrific showcase of Wilco’s strengths in composition and musicality. “Bull Black Nova,” meanwhile, is bizarro art-rock with a side of kraut– its tension and nervous, shifting energy make it a standout, so much so that critics and fans alike seem to agree that it’s the album’s finest song. But that in itself is oddly problematic: It’s also the record’s strangest, most experimental song, and the fact that it works so much more effectively than the more straightforward pop offerings the band seems to favor shows just what sort of a corner they’re backed into. What should have been a summary of their ambitions turns out to be a summary of their record collection– a fractured, messy album that’s big on variety and not lacking in fine moments, but a mess nevertheless, with no sense of self present to help these songs congeal into The Album they might wish it to be.

The King of Pop

“If you remember Michael Jackson as a weirdo you didn’t know him. There was a long, beautiful, groundbreaking career before all that.” –Journalist Toure, via Twitter

“May we stop making idols of and then destroying our celebrities soon.” –Beth Maynard, via Twitter

My friend Gavin Breeden has an eloquent tribute, saying it as well as I ever could.

On Repeat: Mos Def

It may turn out that Mos Def is only capable of releasing one really great album every ten years– and I’d almost be okay with that. As it stands, he’s already released two of ‘em, and that’s two more great albums than most artists release in their entire career. In 1999, just a year after his appearance as one-half of the compassionate, back-to-basics rap duo Black Star (which I guess could technically bump our count up to three great albums), Mos released Black on Both Sides, a pinnacle of late-90s hip-hop by anyone’s standard. Then he spent a solid decade puttering around in various movies, occasionally returning to recording only to release increasingly mediocre , self-indulgent material that suggested movie stardom had become more important to him than his music. And then, in 2009– almost ten years exactly since Black on Both Sides– he hit with The Ecstatic, an album that’s almost entirely different from Both Sides yet no less mercurial or brilliant. In fact, I’m not sure that you could find a better two albums to represent the best in socially aware, artistically volatile hip-hop.

That Mos Def struck brilliance with two wildly different albums is, I’d propose, a testament to his own creative restlessness and determined eclecticism. Even on his lesser albums, he always seems like an artist who insists on making music on his own terms and never repeating himself, which explains how his two pinnacles can stand as two unique sides to a singular talent. Black on Both Sides, of course, remains an epic, a marathon-length hip-hop album that, remarkably, never loses its steam or relents in its pursuit of excellence and diversity. It’s also an album that’s rich in thoughtful and compassionate lyrics about race, class, love, and hip-hop– not even Public Enemy wrote such eloquent and sharp arguments, and they were certainly never as warm– so it makes sense that the album is very much structured as a big, ambitious statement: It’s a manifesto, full and complete and sweeping in its scope.

The Ecstatic, meanwhile, is not a manifesto. In fact, I’m still not entirely sure what it is, even though I’ve played it nearly every day for the past few weeks. It’s a flight of fancy, but it’s meant to be taken seriously. It’s a weird, rambling album that abandons typical verse-chorus structures in favor of a seamless, suite-like flow, but it’s never self-indulgent. It’s filled with loose ends and rabbit trails– Mos sings in Spanish, writes a weird love song that could be to either a girl or a fun, incorporates Bollywood chorus lines, and half-mumbles through a couple of tracks like he’s making it up as he goes along– yet it’s also very complete, its ragged charm and rough edges enhancing the fact that it’s meant to be taken as a piece.

But above all else, it’s an anomaly in hip-hop, and indeed pop music in general, in that it’s an album that’s born from a place of real, genuine curiosity: Mos raps about signs and wonders, miracles and answered prayers, and the joy of living life in marvelous times, even as the winds of time and war and poverty rattle through some of the album’s corridors. Even when he’s singing about unemployment or war in Iraq, the artist never drops his stance of wide-eyed wonderment and childlike optimism.

That makes it personal. It makes it inspiring. And it even reminds me a bit of my favorite record of all time, Joe Henry’s Tiny Voices. What I mean by that is: It seems to recreate itself every time I play it, as though I’m listening not just to music being played, but to an actual act of spontaneous creativity. I’m thankful for that– a minor miracle, indeed.

Regina Spektor: “Far”

At this point, there’s probably not much point trying to tie Regina Spektor’s career to a strict, straightforward narrative arc. On the surface, hers might seem like a common enough story: The artist cranks out a few cult records in relative obscurity, attracts major label attention with her breakthrough Soviet Kitsch, then steps into the big-time with Begin to Hope, a bigger-budget album that made enough pop concessions to draw in a few new fans but not so many that she lost many of her old ones.

The thing is, nothing’s quite as simple as it first seems with Regina Spektor: Her music has always been pop at heart, and Begin to Hope didn’t reject her quirkier tendencies so much as it smoothed them out a bit. And now, Far muddies things even more; at once the most commercial and accessible album of her career as well as a more sophisticated and deceptive album than Begin to Hope, it’s nothing if not a careful and competent demonstration of how to make a play for the mainstream without selling your soul.

Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.

The Eels: “Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire”

The titles say it all. In 2005, Mark Everett—or E, as he prefers being called—released an album under his Eels banner called Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, and it was exactly what its grandiose title suggested: An album that was both epic and revelatory, a sprawling double-discer in which our grizzled hero confronted head-on the death of his parents, by means of childhood reflection and sober-minded acceptance of life’s fragility. Four years later, he’s back with a set called Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire, and if the title is just as long, it’s also stranger and funnier and a bit less sweeping. The album itself is much the same way: It’s shorter—just one disc this time—and more concerned with matters primal and carnal. Blinking Lights was epic pop, but Hombre, with its werewolf-referencing title, is a dirty, raucous garage sound, pitching its tent closer to gothic blues than to Thriller-styled kitsch but maintaining a winking sense of humor nevertheless.

Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.

Dinosaur Jr.: “Farm”

When Dinosaur Jr. released Beyond in 2007, it may not have qualified as a full-fledged event, but it was at least a pretty big deal– one of those rare albums that is automatically something special for the mere fact that it exists, to say nothing of the actual music. After all, when the band split in the early 90s, it wasn’t exactly amicable; plus, the group had always exemplified slacker-rock, writing anthems of apathy and approaching their records with a certain kind of detachment. And yet, there they were again, in their original line-up, playing together not only with amiability, not even with enthusiasm, but– for the first time ever– with real, honest-to-goodness engagement. Like a band with something to prove.

That goes pretty far in explaining why Beyond was a truly great album– almost spectacularly so– but also why its 2009 follow-up, Farm, is merely very good. Two years ago, Dinosaur Jr. was declaring that they were back with a vengeance, ready to bang out what was arguably their finest album yet; and, given how well everything gelled on that album, it’s considerably less surprising to find them forging ahead, settling into a comfortable groove that suggests they’re simply glad to be playing together again.

And that’s the big thing that makes Farm a bit less thrilling than Beyond: A new level of comfort. Two years ago, they sounded hungry, whereas here they sound content. As a result, they don’t quite push themselves on Farm the way they did on Beyond, and so there’s nothing here that rocks with quite as much abandon as “Almost Ready,” struts with quite as much swagger as “Back to Your Heart,” or glistens with the same depth and texture as “Crumble.”

But with all that said, it’s still worth noting that even a slightly less than great Dinosaur Jr. album is still something to celebrate, because Dinosaur Jr. is still one of the great American bands. And if they want to crank out an album of sturdy, thoroughly enjoyable guitar rock of this caliber, I’m not going to complain too much, as it really is a joy to hear them play together, particularly when they lock into a groove, as they do here. And if Farm doesn’t hit the highs of Beyond, it must also be said that it’s a consistent album with no bad songs or filler.

J. Mascis has said in the past that Dinosaur Jr.’s songs are basically country songs cranked up really loud, which has the ring of truth to it: It certainly explains how these songs can sound so simple yet also be so visceral and addicting, which they certainly are. “Ocean in the Way” is a sad-sack ballad cranked up to heavy-metal volumes and turned into a true head-banger, particularly when the guitar solo kicks in, and “Over There” is a careening rocker that employs wah-wah effects to sound more complicated than it really is. The band still bangs out quick, hard-hitting punk-ish rock songs like nobody else, and they do stretch themselves a bit on the long, dense ballad “Places,” but the heart of the album lies in a couple of sprawling, no-frills jam sessions.

And that, of course, shows where the heart of the band is as well. They’re stretching out and digging in, finding their groove and settling in. They’ve got no one to impress, and they seem perfectly happy just to be jamming together. I’m okay with that. Not many bands can rock like Dinosaur Jr. can, and even fewer can play with this kind of chemistry and off-the-cutt interplay. So even if Farm is a minor achievement, it’s still majorly enjoyable.