Sebadoh, Literature

Lou Barlow is a songwriter as capable of penning devastating ballads of heartbreak and woe as he is writing buoyant slabs of noisy, aggressive punk — he can have you in tears one moment, and contemplating a mosh pit the next. And the man knows noise as a founding member of Dinosaur Jr., a band he reunited with in 2005. Thankfully Sebadoh, the band Barlow formed in 1986 as an outlet when he couldn’t get many of his own tunes on early Dinosaur albums, proved to be just as enduring, producing some classics through the ’90s like Bubble and Scrape and Bakesale. In 2013, Sebadoh released their first new album in 14 years, and Defend Yourself fits right alongside the older material, matching beauty and beastly riffs in glorious ways.