Pearl Jam: Pearl Jam
Somewhat unbelievably, this is the first review of anything Pearl Jam I’ve done that hasn’t been of their 2003 tour. It’s been 15 months since I finished that puppy off, and I’ve been staring at this album, dreading it, ever since. As of this posting, my to-be-listened-to pile will be devoid of Pearl Jam for the first time in over five years.
Released in 2006, this album doesn’t contain anything I heard on that seemingly interminable tour, and so it was refreshing to hear the band pounding out some new songs. This might be the band’s worst record, though, and so the breath of fresh air didn’t last long and I’m back to literally feeling nauseous while I write this. Pearl Jam is this decade’s Vs., which is the album competing with this one for the worst in the band’s history. Here the band goes back strongly to the raw, fast punky stuff they were doing on that album, Vitalogy, and, to a lesser extent, Binaural. However, there’s nothing on here as fantastic as Vitalogy’s “Last Exit” or “Corduroy,” or even “Go” from Vs.
I’ve counted Pearl Jam out before, but they bounced back to release a great string of albums that is now their mid-career stretch (No Code, Yield, and Binaural). However, I can’t help but feel that they’ve just reached their end here. The performances are strong but uninspired, and the songwriting, while containing novel approaches here and there, is a hodge-podge of things that they’ve done in the past: screamy punk here, a plodding half-ballad there. While most songs have some progression or odd time signature that catches my ear, it’s rare that one wraps me up inside of it for its entirety, with the album’s high point, “Marker In The Sand” being the exception.
The disc is on a roughly three-and-a-half lunchbox trajectory through the first eight tracks or so, with the inventiveness outweighing the banality by a decent enough margin. Starting with the third single, “Gone,” though, things take a pretty severe nosedive. “Gone” itself might as well just be Binaural’s “Nothing As It Seems” or Riot Act’s “I Am Mine,” and by the time we get to the album’s requisite epic seven-and-a-half minute closer, “Inside Job,” I’m able to predict all but about thirty seconds of it.
Still, there are a decent amount of songs worth listening to here, and even more that contain at least one or two riffs that are notably creative for such an aged band (“Comatose” and “Unemployable,” for example). So it’s not write-off-able, but it’s going to take more than this to ease my stomach’s reaction when thinking of this band after it hung around through 72 concerts from the same tour.
Rating:
Mixers: “Marker In The Sand”
Keepers: “World Wide Suicide,” “Life Wasted,” “Parachutes,” “Big Wave,” “Wasted Reprieve”
Filed Between: Pearl Jam’s Lost Dogs and Peeping Tom (Peeping Tom)
Tags: 2006, 3 lunchboxes, CD reviews, music