I first heard Dinosaur Jr the way a lot of people my age did: “Feel the Pain” on the radio. This was the early-mid 90s when “alternative” was mainstream enough to be on the radio but still meant something. It was outside the lines and still fun. I was ten or twelve, way too young to understand what avant-garde even meant, but I understood that this band had found some kind of balance between weird and welcoming, and I’ve stayed with them ever since. Now we’re at There Near, the sixth album since the group’s 2005 reunion, and their thirteenth overall. But now that I’ve sat with it for a while, I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I’m supposed to say about it.
Here’s the problem, if it is one: There Near is a great Dinosaur Jr album.
The guitars are fuzzed to the edge of collapse. The bass is gnarly in that Lou Barlow-esque way. The rhythms lurch and catch themselves, and the lyrics are sardonic without ever tipping into bitter. Every hallmark of the band is present and accounted for. If you already love them, you know exactly what you’re getting, and you get it exactly. If you don’t love them, nothing on There Near will change your mind. There is no left turn or reinvention here. There is just Dinosaur Jr being Dinosaur Jr very well.
Which means the review almost writes itself into a corner: what is there to actually say about Dinosaur Jr or There Near? I don’t think I’m alone in that. There hasn’t been a ton of loud coverage around this record, and I suspect most outlets that did cover it landed somewhere close to where I have. A solid, expected, well-made, not much of a hook for a thousand words.
And that bothers me because I want people to talk about this album.
I want people who care about indie rock and guitar music to have an opinion on it. But if the honest opinion is something like, “It’s good, and it’s exactly what I thought it would be,” that’s a strange thing to build a review around. I don’t think critics have ever learned quite how to write about art in this way. The project is definitely not bad enough to dunk on, but it’s also not surprising or intriguing enough to rave about. It’s just there.
I run into this same wall with Guided By Voices all the time. Robert Pollard has put out records at a pace that makes reviewing them feel almost beside the point. You’re not evaluating whether it’s good; you’re evaluating whether it’s another one, and the answer is always yes. The catalog is so exhaustive there’s no real place to start, and any track from any album will do. It comes down to whether you want the DIY, homespun production of the early years, the glossier millennium era, or the modern-day legacy of a band that simply refuses to give up the ghost.
Dinosaur Jr isn’t nearly that prolific, but they’re playing a version of the same game.
The band figured out its sound decades ago and has kept making it competently, without much interest in moving the goalposts. AC/DC also belongs in this conversation, and they’ve made a running joke of it themselves. They have more or less admitted to remaking the same album on repeat. If you’re in a public place and want to hear “Back In Black” on the jukebox, but it only has “Shoot to Thrill,” you don’t get upset. Pretty much every AC/DC track is interchangeable without any issues. But when AC/DC do it, it tends to read as derivative, as a band going through the motions.
Dinosaur Jr doing the same thing shouldn’t feel any different on paper, and yet it does. It doesn’t feel like a band coasting on a formula. It feels like a band that just happens to be extremely good at one specific thing, still doing that thing at full capacity, decades later.
And when I frame it that way, I think Dinosaur Jr might be the best-case version of this kind of band.
GBV throws so much at the wall that the hit rate becomes the story. Dinosaur Jr’s hit rate, album after album, is quietly excellent. There Near isn’t going to give you a “Freak Scene,” as nothing on it grabs you by the collar the way it would’ve on MTV in a post-new wave world, but it also doesn’t have a bad song on it. Which is its own kind of achievement twenty years into a second act nobody was owed in the first place.
That’s not to say there aren’t hooks in There Near. Quite the contrary, as there are plenty! The lead single, “Several Got Away,” reminds me of “I Don’t Think So”. It’s a standard-issue Dinosaur Jr, but with a certain this is the single quality to it. The band still knows exactly what it means to have one song carry the rest of the record. Meanwhile, “Everything At Once” slows things down and leans into a vibe that feels less like a bid for a single and more like a distillation of the band itself.
So would I want them to evolve? Genuinely, no. Consistency is the gimmick, if you can call it that.
It’s the audacity of being this reliable for this long in a genre that usually rewards either explosive change or flaming out. There Near doesn’t ask to be reviewed so much as it asks to be trusted, and it earns that trust the same way the last five albums did. Maybe that’s the review. Not “Here’s what’s new,” but “Here’s what’s still here, and why that’s worth more than it sounds like on paper.”
It does leave me with a bigger question, one I don’t have a clean answer for: Do bands like Dinosaur Jr even need coverage? Should we be reviewing records from artists whose whole project, decades in the running, is to not surprise us? I’ve just spent a thousand words insisting there wasn’t much to say about this record. And yet, somehow still had plenty to say. Make of that what you will.
There Near is out now via Jagjaguwar.