BitterJalapeno
Released in December 1987, “You’re Living All Over Me” is the second studio album by Massachusetts based alternative rock legends Dinosaur Jr. Following on from the strange mix of folk and hardcore punk on their debut album, “You’re Living All Over Me” projects a sound so far removed from the debut and so ahead of its time that it’s hard to summarise succinctly.
It blends copious amounts of noise with addictive riffs, catchy hooks and glazes it all with wonderfully humbling sense of melancholy. J. Mascis demonstrates such skill and ingenuity in his guitar playing that at points, it’s borderline genius without the intricacy of virtuosity. Lou Barlow’s thick, driving bass lines and Murph’s pounding drum rhythms and very tight fills are the perfect accompaniment.
The opening track “Little Fury Things” contains some of the laziest, drawling vocals imaginable and makes Neil Young sound energetic in comparison. The vocal melody is immersive, nostalgic and will get stuck in your head all day. The following “Kracked” is full to the brim with memorable hooks and riffs.
The highlight of the album for me personally is the epic “Sludgefeast” which juxtaposes mellow vocal parts against incredible angular guitar riffing and boasts an utterly blistering outro with a solo in which Mascis sounds like he’s tearing his guitar apart. Following this, “The Lung” is an interesting riff peppered track with an interesting progressive structure and more superb guitar work from Mascis.
“Raisans” is easily the most musically accessible track on the album with its infectiously catchy chorus and is pretty much just a great simple punk rock song. Despite this, they still manage to inject some weirdness and make song sound chilling by including recordings of the screams and moans of patients in a nursing home within the middle breakdown.
I could go on in a similar vein about all the featured songs but will now summarise by saying that “You’re Living All Over Me” is a piece of work so undeniably influential on the alternative rock movement of the 90s that without it, the entire scene would have sounded somewhat different and evidently not for the better. You can clearly hear Nirvana without the anger, Foo Fighters without the polished radio friendliness and The Smashing Pumpkins without the anal musical precision – all long before these bands became established.
Simply put, it’s an essential album for any fan of alternative rock music and was a major stepping stone in paving the way for some of the biggest names in the genre and is one of the most important and overlooked albums of the last two decades of the 20th century.