Frankly, ballads tend to be the appetizers for concertgoers and don’t translate very well to massive venues of the sort Pearl Jam tends to play. Also, over the last fifteen years, Pearl Jam became known as a live band first and foremost, with albums feeling like promotions for tours and not the other way around.
The first is to counter that exact old-dudeness that I’m asking them to embrace their previous two albums, 2006’s Pearl Jam and 2009’s Backspacer, seemingly existed to prove that these fortysomethings still had it. I understand that there are reasons why a band like Pearl Jam doesn’t release an album of slow songs. “Sirens” the album’s second single, is a big ballad that sounds like the type of song crafty veterans with over two decades of music would release. As a result, a song like the lead single on Lightning Bolt, “Mind Your Manners” - with catchy, raucous, driving Eddie Vedder vocals - kind of sounds like Vitalogy standout “Spin the Black Circle” as performed by a bunch of old dudes. It’s not their fault, and it obviously wasn’t their intention, but with their first three records they defined a sound, and that sound is now old enough to drink. The louder, more rocking Pearl Jam songs on the record carry the weight of sounding too much like “Pearl Jam songs” - a sound that was sullied over the years by the absolute worst sorts of bands (you don’t want your band in the same sentence as Creed, even if that sentence is “Creed is like Pearl Jam if Pearl Jam were a bunch of shitty, talentless hacks”). Whether they’re the album’s best songs is hard to tell yet, but they are definitely the ones that feel the most current. Lightning Bolt, however, has an unprecedented six, on an album with only twelve songs, no less.
featured three of the band’s best light songs: “Daughter,” “Indifference,” and “Elderly Women Behind the Counter in a Small Town.” And every record since had at least a few. That changed fairly quickly, as 1993’s Vs. A few songs have balladic moments - “Black,” “Oceans,” “Release” - but they all escalate, like grunge songs are wont to do, to a point that would surely shatter a coffee shop’s teacups. Ten, Pearl Jam’s 1991 debut and the album most people will cite when asked to name a Pearl Jam record, didn’t really have any ballads. Namely, Pearl Jam should release an album of ballads. The group’s latest effort, Lightning Bolt, which came out today, is not going to change that stigma, but it does offer a glimpse at a possible direction that might. Like any Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney record released in the past 25 years, a new Pearl Jam album is, to many people, a reminder of previous glory and not something currently relevant.
Pearl Jam is a band squarely in its classic-rock phase. It was like I was pitching a story about Bush or Candlebox.īut I get it. “The Vulture’s Nest,” a secret boardroom underneath a desert island’s volcano), I started in with my pitch for this Pearl Jam piece, only to be met with chuckles from my smiling colleagues.
Last week, at our weekly ideas meeting held at the usual location (a.k.a. LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 12: Musician Eddie Vedder performs at the 2nd Annual Sean Penn and Friends Help Haiti Home Gala benefiting J/P HRO presented by Giorgio Armani at Montage Hotel on Januin Los Angeles, California.
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