Sweep It Into Space

What they have delivered sounds like Dinosaur Jr. are at ease with themselves, but they still enjoy making a hellacious din at the appropriate time.

Another excellent installment. [Jun 2021, p.87]

Yes, some people will say they rarely change, that there isn’t enough variety across this or any Dinosaur album. Only Take It Back’s funky mellotron truly surprises. Elsewhere I Ain’t, To Be Waiting and I Ran Away stick fruitfully to the script. Yet that’s what good work is. Showing up, hitting your marks, doing what you do best. Some people are staring at the bricks, not noticing the palace they built.

While the current lockdown has certainly affected the band, the mix of melancholy/yearning leading towards wonder/delight has always been at the heart of Dinosaur Jr.’s sound. Now those styles inform Sweep It Into Space with a vivid sense of the isolating present while gazing at hope on the horizon.

Sweep It Into Space boasts some of the catchiest and most immediate songs Dinosaur Jr. has released since their reunion. There aren't many sharp turns or wild surprises, just a one-of-a-kind band doing what they do best.

There’s nothing on here quite as catchy as Tiny from Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not, but that may well be because this is a more consistent effort, an album full of highlights that reminds us that being ​‘lovely’ and ​‘loud’ aren’t mutually exclusive qualities, while furthering one of the most consistent catalogues in rock.

The sprightly, exuberant Sweep It Into Space doesn’t just provide an especially good opportunity to look back on how far these three guys from Amherst have come since the early ‘90s, it also finds them making their most life-affirming music to date, exploring new tones and textures without betraying their monolithic, thundering signature sound.

As familiar as a hug from an old friend. Yet the band's knack for colliding pop melodies with thrashing drums, pummelling bass and screeching guitars is as effective as ever. [May 2021, p.25]

It's another touchdown for the guitar heroes, one we suggest cranking up loud and enjoying in the spring sunshine.

While long-gone are the sonic textures of the band's early years — replaced here with some novel and resourceful instrumentation — the group's second (and now longest) run has been unbelievably solid and unimpeachable.

“Take It Back” aside, Dinosaur Jr. tend to get by on a fairly limited sonic palette. Yet the trio continues to find compelling ways to fuse their core musical elements into songs that resonate, on albums that almost never misfire. Sweep It Into Space is merely the latest example.

When you turn on a Dinosaur Jr. record, the thinking goes, it should always sound like a Dinosaur Jr. record. I’m happy to report that Sweep It into Space does, in fact, check this box.

It’s the breeziest and most melodically generous of the trio’s reunion efforts, even flirting with power-pop on the compulsively hummable “And Me.”

Sweep It Into Space obviously can’t rival that career high, but it is a leading candidate for their best post-reformation effort.

Ear-bleed guitar glory and woolly-headed grandeur from J. Mascis and Co. [May 2021, p.76]

So J did his usual effortless stand-in thang on guitar, and with Lou writing two beautiful soft rockers and Murph powering away on drums created another album to stand if not quite the equal of the original Dinosaur albums that around the end of the 80s helped change the face of US alternative rock, then somewhere close.

A decent album, then. Not a great one, but one that can still hold its own against any other indie rock album released this year. There’s life in these old veterans yet.

Sweep It Into Space is as solid a selection of songs as they’ve ever produced and broadly typifies why they are so beloved.