The Wagon

A wall of distorted guitar announces itself like a freight train jumping its tracks — jagged, almost comically aggressive, yet driven by an undeniable melodic pull that J Mascis seems to drag out of the chaos through sheer stubbornness. The tempo lurches and surges, with drums crashing in with gleeful imprecision, giving the whole thing a feel of barely-controlled momentum. Mascis's voice arrives buried in the mix, a drowsy, adenoidal drawl that sounds simultaneously disinterested and achingly sincere — as if the emotion is too large to perform with any effort. The song circles an elliptical kind of frustration, a sense of being stuck in place while the world spins, unable to commit to movement even when movement is clearly needed. The lead guitar solo erupts mid-song like a fever breaking, cascading and melodic in a way that contrasts almost violently with the deliberate ugliness of everything surrounding it — this is Mascis's signature, turning noise into something genuinely plaintive. It sits at the center of early-nineties alternative guitar rock, the moment when indie sensibility and hard rock volume found each other and decided not to apologize. You reach for this song when you're driving somewhere you don't particularly want to go, highway stretching ahead, guitar volume high enough to make the decision feel less like surrender.