The return and reform of bands from bygone and bet­ter days rarely makes for a pret­ty pic­ture. What a refresh­ing change then that the sight of Dinosaur Junior made when they returned in 2007 with their then new album, Beyond.

They set the tone for much of what hap­pened to indie music in the 90s with their trio of albums from the late 80s. The third of which, Bug pro­vid­ed them with their sig­na­ture tunes, “Freak Scene” and their cov­er of the then only recent­ly released Cure track, “Just Like Heaven”.

You can see the video for the for­mer here and the lat­ter here.

They man­aged to meld and mar­ry the sound of Son­ic Youth and My Bloody Valen­tine with Teenage Fan­club and Led Zep­pelin, in their majes­tic tour­ing rather than their lead­en record­ing guise.

The suc­cess of which, pre­dictably, was fol­lowed by their imme­di­ate break-up in 1990. So when news of their reform emerged in 2005, it was met with jus­ti­fi­able skep­ti­cism. Not anoth­er trio of washed-up has-beens in need of sup­ple­ment­ing their now mea­ger incomes.

So the album that fol­lowed two years lat­er, Beyond, was a wel­come and all too rare sur­prise. Some­how, and in an entire­ly good way, it sound­ed like they’d nev­er been away.

Maybe it’s that Manichaean mix of theirs for­ev­er duel­ing for dom­i­nance. The noisy, dis­so­nant chaos of the dis­tort­ed feed­back ver­sus the ele­giac, qui­et calm of the dolor­ous melodies. Punk and met­al meets alt coun­try, and all of it decades ahead of its time.

At the cen­tre of it all is J Mas­cis, the cre­ative force at the core of the band, and, one imag­ines, the man respon­si­ble for its con­stant state of shift­ing chaos. There are his so laid back he’s bare­ly awake vocals ignit­ed by a gui­tar that veers between rare men­ace and tri­umphant pow­er chords.

Some­how, and not with­stand­ing all they’d appar­ent­ly been put through, fel­low band mates Lou Bar­low on bass and Murph on drums agreed to get back togeth­er again. And this, I Bet On Sky is the third of their cur­rent come­back albums. And, once again, it’s a gem.

It gets an impressed 7.9 from the boys from Pitch­fork here. And you can see the lat­est video from it here.

Sign up for a sub­scrip­tion right or below, and I’ll keep you post­ed every week with All the Very Best and Worst in Film, tele­vi­sion and Music.