Foggy notions

J Mascis returns

by Brett Milano

STAR:full of catchy tunes and plenty of guitar, More Light sounds like the comeback it needed to be.

J Mascis gets my vote as the most unlikely rock star to come out of the grunge era. Not cute, not especially charismatic, prone to random guitar solos and blessed with a haphazard approach to songwriting and recording, he was a gifted oddball who came along at a time when somebody forgot to lock the gifted oddballs out of the club.

From the sound of things, Mascis hasn’t gotten any more self-assured over the years: At least half the songs on More Light (Ultimatum/Artemis) — credited to J Mascis + the Fog, though it amounts to a new Dinosaur Jr. album — are about what a mess he is. The rest ask an unidenti ed someone — be it a friend, a lover, or his fan base — to come bail him out. (The titles alone tell the story: “Wastin’,” “I’m Not Fine,” “Ground Me to You”). If his self-effacement is still endearing after all these years, that’s because he’s still a smarter musician than he lets on. After years of diminishing returns with Dino Jr., he likely gured that More Light needed to sound like a comeback, and it does. Brimming with catchy tunes and every guitar sound in the book, the music evinces the confidence that Mascis won’t allow himself in his lyrics.

The basic band — that is, Mascis playing almost everything — hasn’t changed since the last batch of Dino Jr. albums. But he now presides over something of a gifted-oddballs’ society: My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields co-produces and plays some guitar; Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard sings back-up; Mike Watt has since joined as tour bassist (he and ex-Dino drummer George Berz will be with Mascis as he tours the US and Europe. Shields’s presence is the most surprising — not least because he’s been working on his own band’s album for nine years and counting — but the instrumental title track, on which one guitar chord gets whooshed and hammered for five minutes, is the disc’s only real Bloody Valentine move. Elsewhere the production gives Mascis’s songs a long-needed layer of polish: vocals are refined beyond the first-take stage, guitar parts are doubled and tripled, solos are played only when necessary.

Not that it’s exactly a big-time production: you can still hear Mascis’s drum parts speed up more than once; and he and Pollard manage to go off-key at the same time on “I’m Not Fine.” But it’s just produced enough to show how affecting his songwriting can be. “I’m Not Fine” and “Wastin’ ” are both three-chord garage tunes about screwing up; the music attests to how much fun that can be even as the singer swears he’s going to get himself together. “Ground Me to You” is as explicit a plea for love as he’s written (complete with an ascending piano part that threatens to break into “Maggie May” at any minute), and it’s brought home by a warm and offhand vocal. This is a singer putting on nonchalance for effect instead of really being caught up in it.

When we speak over the phone, Mascis has to remind me that it hasn’t been all that long since the last Dinosaur Jr. album — in fact, I’d forgotten about Hand It Over (on Sire), which came out in the spring of 1997. I own that album; I even reviewed it favorably upon its release, but then I filed it away and never came back to it. So I’d just answered my own question about why he felt the need to put Dinosaur Jr. to rest. “A lot of people didn’t know that album came out, because Warners didn’t tell anyone. It was depressing playing those songs on tour and having people ask me when they were coming out when they already were. Not being in Dinosaur Jr. seems to free my mind up. There’s a certain burden attached to the whole history of Dinosaur Jr.; it feels really heavy somehow.”

That’s as clear a statement of motivation as you’ll get from Mascis, who remains an expert at brushing off questions — whether they’re about what he’s been up to (“Uh, good question — you know, more of the same thing”), the mood of his album (“I guess I maybe feel more upbeat, but I don’t know, it’s hard to say”), or the sound of his new live band (“Beats me — it’s not like we’ve practiced or anything”). He’s more likely to brighten up on the subject of Uma Thurman — who lived in his home town of Amherst for a while, and whom he once spotted waitressing at a favorite college hangout — than on his own career. So go ahead and call him an unrepentant slacker. More likely he’s just someone with a clear sense of what really matters.