Reviewing Dinosaur Jr's latest album There Near recently, I noted the members' fractious dysfunctional and fractious relationships, but suggested that they've "come to realise that they're bound by deeper ties" - a band finally "at peace with the idea that they work best together". It's a suggestion very much borne out by this fantastic Pitchfork article by Grayson Haver Currin, in which he traces the trio's history through extensive interviews with J Mascis in particular.
Along the way, Currin is repeatedly bang on the money - whether claiming that Mascis' work in Dinosaur Jr "recast[s] the exquisite ache of Neil Young at obliterative volume" or describing him as "a gentle singer who understands the frisson of an unhinged electric solo in an acoustic song" (something I can very much vouch for, having seen him on his own in Nottingham in 2002). Currin is also right to emphasise that Mascis "avoids the usual trappings of a guitar god. Onstage with Dinosaur Jr, he is largely still, save for his fingers and feet, standing like someone who hopes to be swallowed by the triple tower of Marshall stacks behind him."
Mascis has a reputation as a difficult, unwilling and recalcitrant interviewee (arguably rightly, though Mascis himself disagrees). So Currin deserves enormous credit for putting him at enough ease to willingly expose facets of his character that I never knew existed: the joker (he claims "he might have acquired tennis elbow during an alien abduction"), the social butterfly (albeit grudgingly - who complains about having to go to Kim Gordon's house for dinner?), the "enthusiastic gossip".
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