by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
Pearl Jam is probably the worst band name in history.
Nonetheless, it's a good name for its latest album, Pearl Jam.
Though it has often been criticized for "experimenting," Pearl Jam is only good when it's reinventing itself. Its latest release finds it newly confident, drawing on the punk vein of the last two albums and finally making it work. Though superficially similar to some of its recent work, this is a band reborn.
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I was fully prepared to sign death certificates before listening to this album, but Eddie Vedder and company have proven they still have something to offer. Unlike the past three releases, this album can't be written off as outdated or insignificant. It's like members woke up one day and realized they were still allowed to write relevant songs. They've regained their youthful anger, and their punk-influenced style sounds genuine for the first time in years.
The best album since No Code - the last of a stretch of three great albums released in the mid-'90s - Pearl Jam finds the band at its darkest one moment, surprisingly campy the next. Often, it's both at the same time.
President Bush - the second the band has lived through - deserves some credit for its newfound inspiration. Unlike most rock bands today, Pearl Jam isn't too cool to get angry over gross deteriorations of liberty or insane wars.
The album can't be reduced to political slogans, though. Instead, it's a call for people to start giving a shit. The opening track laments "a life wasted" in apathy, a bitter pill even uber-hipsters The Strokes swallowed on their last album, when they derided we are "an entire generation with nothing to say."
The theme of self-negation repeats in the extremely catchy "World Wide Suicide," the sardonic punk of "Comatose," and the melancholy "Gone."
Of course, you'll need the lyric book to discern this - or to confirm that the songs are even in English. Vedder has always mumbled, but this album finds him at his worst. At times, it sounds like he's just making fun of himself.
There are other problems, too. The band ruins "Marker in the Sand" and the final track, "Inside Job," with choruses that could only be described as corny. It does its best to turn "Severed Hand" into a failure with a ridiculous Van Halen-style guitar solo. And members just embarrass themselves with "Come Back," a bizarre and unnecessary attempt at a soul ballad.
Still, the good moments far outweigh the bad. The fast, straight-up rock tracks, forming the backbone of the album, are nearly flawless. Songs like "Parachutes" and "Unemployable" are some of Pearl Jam's most subtle, complex and beautiful to date. Returning to producer Adam Kasper, the sound is energetic and raw, and even the duds fail to disrupt the flow.
Musically, Pearl Jam is one of the best groups out there. Without showing off, it puts less creative, less talented bands to shame. It's refreshing to hear a band that not only knows how to play its instruments, but puts them to masterful use, too.
Pearl Jam is still too mainstream for fans of underground music, and too weird for fans of mainstream. The modern radio rock that it spawned bears no more resemblance to its music now than to Bolivian gangster rap. It didn't fit into the grunge scene when it started, and it doesn't fit into any scene now.
But for honest fans of music, people brave enough to venture out of one or two hip genres, this album is good news.
