Like most fans of Dinosaur Jr. from the old days, I had no expectation that this album would be one of their best. I was psyched to hear that the band was going to do a new album after the unanticipated reunion and tour of the original line up, but while the idea of them playing their old material live was exciting, I figured that like most bands that had reunited, their new material would be interesting at best and more probably just a tad sad. Instead, we got a shockingly good album.

And J. Mascis is back. I'd heard some of his post-DJ solo work and while some of it was somewhat interesting, I was never blown away like I had been with YOU'RE LIVING ALL OVER ME, BUG, or GREEN MIND. And his guitar playing just stopped having the same kind of fire that it had had with those albums. That was tragic because I thought Mascis one of the greatest guitarists of the eighties, maybe the greatest guitarist of the late eighties. His playing on this new album shows him completely and utterly back in form.

You have to understand that when I was a kid (imagine the latter as said by Walter Brennan), me and my friends would engage in savage arguments about the various guitar gods. We'd play and replay solos by Rory Gallagher or Roy Buchanan or Phil Keaggy (who proved that you could be a born again Christian and still play the guitar) or he who was Hendrix and debate their pros and cons, insisting on the merits of this guitar deity over that one. We'd almost come to blows over Clapton versus Allman on LAYLA. Hearing Mascis's best solos on this album makes me want to contact my old college music buddies and kindle a new debate. This is without question some of the best guitar playing you'll ever hear. It isn't the best song on the album, but the long guitar solo that starts at the 3:34 mark of "Pick Me Up" and lasts precisely the last three minutes of the cut goes on my short list of the greatest guitar solos I've ever heard. Mascis plays not merely as if his life depended upon his playing, but something greater, like the future of Western Civilization or the existence of joy. When I was a kid would-be guitarists would carefully reconstruct and practice Jimmy Page's solos. Aspiring guitarists today could do no better than memorize and master ever note of "Pick Me Up." It'd be a chore, but by the end you'd be a really decent guitarist.

One reason Mascis's playing stands out on this album is that in this mix the guitarist is brought completely to the forefront. On a lot of classic albums the guitar was obviously present, but it would sometimes not stand out from the rest of the stuff going on. "Grunge" really did apply to it. There is a clarity here often lacking in the past. The playing here is really in-your-face and all the better for it.

But this album is more than Mascis's complete return to form as a guitar god; it is a killer collection of songs. A couple of the cuts are weak toward the end, but even those have some interesting moments. And a few of the songs are just extraordinary, like the opening number, "Almost Ready." My favorite part of the album, however, is probably the back-to-back-to-back-to back of "Pick Me Up," "Back to Your Heart," "This is All I Came to Do" (with some really splendid playing by Mascis), and "Been There All the Time."

This is just a great album but I do have the same complaint that I had with the first appearance of Dinosaur Jr. and also Lou Barlow's various projects like Sebadoh is the cruddy singing. You'd think that writers as good as Mascis and Barlow would result in at least one person with some minimal ability to sing, but no such luck. Here is my test for singing in a rock band: they have to be better than me. They are not. So hey guys, sign me up! You'd sound better. Seriously, I can't understand how a band with this much talent could be vocally deficient.

This is just a must-get album. I'm really tempted to call this the best reunion album ever. I'd have to think about that some more to stand by that statement, but if it isn't the best it has to be in the top two or three.