“Gone is any notion of J Mascis as a writer lacking emotional bandwidth.”
It’s always felt a little weird that, as the frontman of a band who live are so ear-bleedingly loud in Dinosaur Jr., J Mascis would write solo material which has been set largely in the acoustic realm. (Off topic but sort of on: there’s a hilarious scene in the Lemmy movie about Motorhead soundchecking and eventually turning all the monitors up to 11 every night, but that’s a piece for a different time.)
Seen as lugubrious and often portrayed as difficult to get a story out of, Mascis formed Dinosaur in 1984 as a trio with Lou Barlow and Patrick ‘Murph’ Murphy just as America’s underground music scene was beginning to take shape. Setting out to play ‘ear bleeding country’, the trio have been vastly influential throughout the four decades of their sometimes-fractious existence, with mutual careers punctuated by spells working on other projects and time spent on hiatus.
Whilst to outsiders the hirsute frontman has seemed to personify lazy cliches of the Gen X slacker, the reality is very different: What Do We Do Now may be only his fifth solo album since 1996’s sketchy live document Martin + Me, but when you count work attributed to The Fog, Heavy Blanket, Witch, Sweet Apple and others, he’s played a part in more than twenty releases, a statistic which yells productivity by anyone’s standards.
This latest though is a little different. After playing everything on each studio-based outing so far, here the B-52’s Ken Mauri joins on keyboards, whilst Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn adds some occasional pedal steel. Just as significantly though, this collection also features drums and electric guitars, the end result of a thought process which Mascis admits even he can’t quite figure out himself: ‘It ended up sounding a lot more like a band record…I Dunno why I did that exactly, but it’s just what happened.’
So, a Dino release in all but name then? Well, kind of, but not really and no. Written in the final stages of lockdown and reflecting the emotional crossroads effect that period brought on, the material possesses an undeniable gravity. Reflective opener Can’t Believe We’re Here is an essay in rusty Americana, featuring the singer’s distinctively broken sounding voice accompanied by an ensemble backing that wouldn’t be out of place on a Hold Steady tune until a familiar shredding solo rakes into life at about the two-minute mark.
For an individual who chooses for the most part not to publicly articulate where they are, lyrical clues are not hard to find. Checkers of moods for instance will point to, ‘I’ve been laughing, but I’m lonesome/Out of luck, ran out of steam’, the first lines of the title-track, or the bitter reading, ‘I don’t like you/Fix it in my head’, on I Can’t Find You, painfully honest words on the latter to accompany an otherwise stately number. Gone as a result is any notion of a writer lacking emotional bandwidth.
It’s a peak where there are few troughs amongst the unfussy, one paced melancholy, with the tone often resolute, bordering on defiance. The mould’s rarely broken though so it’s left accordingly to Hangin Out’s swells and the gorgeous urban country of You Don’t Understand Me to defy what is otherwise a benign, wraparound spirit.
What Do We Do Now doesn’t quite demand that you abandon all your preconceptions at the door, and its fine craft tells us lots about J Mascis that we already knew.
For all the lack of adventure however, it’s also proof that you don’t need to have everything in the red if you want to live life loud.
