Dinosaur Jr - Dinosaur

I guess this is technically the self-titled, since Dinosaur Jr. didn't add the suffix until late '87 or early '88 after a legal dispute with some other band called Dinosaurs with ex-members of Jefferson Airplane and some band called Country Joe And The Fish. It should also be noted that the last.fm page for the insecure Dinosaurs has under 3,000 listeners. Roughly 402,000 fewer than the band they tried to disband. OH HOW TIME MAKES FOOLS OF US ALL.

Uninteresting factoid aside, this was the first Dinosaur Jr. album I picked up, and one I used to put in my figurative top 10 albums list in high school. I think their third album, Bug, probably reigns as my most listened Dino album at this point, but this one is still great for sentimental and listening values.
If you're familiar with the two following albums, this is pretty dissimilar to the super-loud, pop-inflected, guitar rock featured on those. It also isn't boring, which separates it vastly from the entire remainder of the band's catalog. What we have here is a completely scattershot approach to songwriting, with elements of jangly pop, Neil Young-esque rock, hardcore, metal, and folk (which is almost completely absent in the rest of their albums), all mixed in a really idiosyncratic, absorbingly weird fashion. As such, it's a pretty difficult album to describe considering the only real cohesion here stems from the prevailing sense of disarmament. "Forget The Swan" and "Repulsion" are great guitar driven pop-rock songs, "Quest" and "Severed Lips" are mopey folk-rock, "Mountain Man" is noisy punk-esque rock, and "Pointless" is a weird, indescribable mess of mumbling, strung-out guitar, and dissonance. My favorite track on here is probably "Does It Float", which starts off as a bouncy, catchy folk-punk number that turns into a screaming, stinging, sea of guitar noise for no apparent reason. Good stuff.

I guess if I was being objective, I'd call this album "a ramshackle snapshot merely hinting at the greatness the band would later embody" or something Pitchfork-y and annoying like that, but I just love the songs way too much. It's true, they did get leagues more cohesive and "rockin" on the next two albums (and as such, you may actually wanna check out You're Living All Over Me or Bug before this one) but this is definitely the band at their most esoteric and interesting. Unfortunately, everything after Bug is pretty dull (not terrible), mostly due to J kicking everyone out and turning it into an ego-stroking pop-grunge act with a lot of wanky solos. Whatever though, he gets a free ride for life on those first 3 as far as I'm concerned.

http://www.mediafire.com/?t191m0sm2b5

Oh, actually, their two reunion albums with the original lineup are pretty decent. Check those out, too.