Beyond Compare

I had a friend in high school who was a Dinosaur Jr. fanatic. In fact, he was such a huge fan that he refused to call them anything but their original name (Dinosaur). So while I've been familiar with Dinosaur Jr. and many of the original member's side projects for a long time, I never actually got around to listening to any of their music until recently. I recently picked up Beyond, which I later learned is result of the band's recent reunion after 19 years apart. It's a great album, and it's the first time I've really gotten excited about anything new in the rock/alt rock genre in a long time. I think that one of the reasons I've never been too big on a lot of the alt rock/indie rock bands is a lot of them don't rock all that hard. The stuff on Beyond rocks pretty hard. It's generally more of a punk influenced sound than the blues rock sound that I really dig, but I've never had a problem with punk rock, providing that it actually rocks.

As an aside, in addition to just getting around to discovering Dinosaur Jr., I'm also still getting my feet wet in the digital music world. I was considering just purchasing a single track from the album (This is All I Came To Do), since it was the only one I was familiar with before making my purchase, but I decided against it. While I like the idea of being able to pick and choose songs individually, I still think that for any reasonably serious artist, the album, while it may be a completely artificial construct in the digital music world, is still an important artistic statement.