Back in stock, the latest vinyl version of Dinosaur Jr's 1985 album Dinosaur that came out on Jagjaguwar. Here's my old writeup for the album from when we stocked the previous vinyl release:

Seeing indie rock legends Dinosaur Jr appearing on our shelves alongside all of the extreme noise tapes and experimental black metal releases that we stock might seem incongrous, but these guys are still one of my personal favorite bands, not to mention one of the most influential outfits to come out of the American post-hardcore underground of the 1980s. And their first three albums, recorded with the original lineup of J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph, total a singular body of work that's well-loved by those who like their rock tempered by unhealthy amounts of noise. That classic trio of albums (Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me, Bug) started off with the band dragging themselves up out of the blitzkrieg hardcore thrash of their previous projects (which included Deep Wound, J and Lou's teenage thrash band that would end up becoming an indirect influence on the nascent grindcore scene) and culminated in some of the loudest and most powerful guitar rock of the decade. After Barlow's departure following Bug, the band would essentially turn into a Mascis solo project and ascend to small-scale MTV stardom in the era of 120 Minutes, producing some truly great albums; but nothing ever came close to the white-hot, distorted fury of those early records and their brilliant fusion of heartfelt melody, avant-noise distortion, overdriven metallic crunch, and 70s rock-refracted punk.

While Bug is probably still my favorite of the first three Dinosaur Jr albums, I love love love the band's thoroughly weird self-titled debut from 1985. Part of it is that they still sorta-sounded like a hardcore band at times, and some of the tracks on Dinosaur were the most overtly aggressive stuff the band ever did. But there's also lots of their noisy pop taking shape here as well, though it wouldn't be until their second album that their mix of crushingly distorted guitars, stoned vocals and infectious pop hooks would come together into the signature Dinosaur sound. On this record, the band's unusual mix of influences was more defined: there's clearly a love of the gloomier end of British post-punk a la early Cure and Joy Division, but they were just as enamoured of proto-thrash metallers Venom, the 70's-era country rock of Neil Young, and still retained some lingering traces of the high energy hardcore punk that Mascis and Barlow belted out in Deep Wound. The result is an admittedly uneven but incredibly imaginative collection of music that ranges from the sloppy noise rock of "Bulbs Of Passion" and the almost gothy gloom of "Forget The Swan" that ends up sprialling into a strange blend of math-rock guitar and dreamy country-rock licks, to the rambunctious cowpunk of "Cats In A Bowl" and the weird, noise-damaged postpunk lurch of "Pointless". The more aggressive songs count as some of my favorites from the band: "The Leper"'s furious yet narcotized hardcore and the noisy, shrieking chaos that takes over at the end of "Does It Float", and the ripping "Mountain Man" mashes their hardcore with a vicious speed metal riff and blasts of screamign wah-drenched soloing. And they could follow that sort of racket with something like "Severed Lips", one of the prettiest tunes these guys ever did. Generally a much rougher and more frantic sound compared to their later albums, with some genuinely bizarre uses of fucked-up production effects and noise that tapped into a kind of mangy psychedelia that rarely heard from Dinosaur Jr following this album.