Pearl Jam are not a band I have enormously strong feelings about one way or another. There are a lot of people who don't feel quite the same way about them. On the one hand, they have a fiercely loyal band of fans who have maintained their faith for the almost thirty years of their career and have no plans to abandon the cause just yet. On the other there's are some who are equally strident types who have never forgiven them for supposed sins commited in 1991 or how much disdain Kurt Cobain had for them from the off.
Whereas I don't mind them and never have. There are a handful of big and important bands in Rock history that I heartily dislike and Pearl Jam have never been among them. In fact they actually occupy a rather important place in my personal memory banks. In 1992, I moved to Dortmund, Germany and worked for a language school there for a couple of years. During that time I made some of my most important life friendships including one with a bloke called Matt who was a huge Grunge convert and a particular fan of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Together we added Smashing Pumpkins and others to the list.
I listened to a fair bit of PJ's first two albums Ten and Versus during that time. They were definitely of their time, I can't have listened through to either for over twenty years. Not that they date particularly, new record Gigaton is hardly a huge departure from the template they laid down almost three decades back.
Pearl Jam churn out chunky, well fed, classic Rock and Roll, utterly reliable and anthemic, capable of speaking to the back rows of large arenas. They've always tried to say something.They emote less than they once did. They're middle aged now of course but this is a sensibility they've always gravitated towards, even from their early days . The early Seventies were their natural habitat, The Who their natural mentors. Even when they varied the line of their attack towards Punk they never fully convinced. In essence they were Stillwater, the band in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous who Mike McCready, one of their two guitarists stood in for Russell Hammond on its soundtrack . A band, on a mission, on the road.
The guitars on Gigaton shriek and howl in an early Seventies manner. Bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron, (once of Soundgarden but in the Pearl Jam fold since 1988), provide an utterly solid rockbed. Vedder, who always had one of Rock's richest, most humane voices, is his reliable self, his voice sounds exactly the same as it did on Ten frankly. Emotionally he's mellowed since then though and this is a good thing.
The songs are sturdy and clearly built too last. Nothing immediately stands out as classic Jam, the album will probably require further plays to ascertain where this will end up ranking in the band's canon. I think I prefer it to much of their early output because it feels as if it's somehow more comfortable in its own skin. There were several moments across the record when I thought, there's something here, I'll need to listen to that again. There is less pomposity, more stoicism and humility, awareness of their smallness in the overall scheme of things than they used to be known for. There were even moments when I was quite moved, particularly in album closer River Cross, which has a similar elemental tug as R.E.M's Find a River and which I'd say is the best thing on the record.
I wish sometimes they'd lighten up a tad and just let the tunes flow but Pearl Jam were never among Rock's easy riders. There was always a sense of struggle, they never had Nirvana's fluid, elasticity, hungry rage or genuine, inspired anarchy. You always got the sense that they were hammering away on a rockface, but there's more awareness of mortality here, the collapsing polar ice shelf on the cover of Gigaton admits as much, but this is a record constructed to endure the test of the elements and time itself. One that wants to be listened to in fifty years time if we're still here. I imagine it will be if we are.
I'll give the record a few more plays over the coming days to see what I think about it overall. As I've indicated, Pearl Jam have never been one of my great loves, as their natural musical habit has never chimed wholly with mine. I imagine we have rather different record collections. One of Vedder's great loves was R.E.M., (my own starting gun in terms of constructing my personal musical taste), he made the induction speech for their Hall of Fame inaugaration.
Nothing, you sense was ever as easy for Pearl Jam as for R.E.M. just as with Nirvana. But they deserve respect merely for the fact that they're still here. None of the band have succumbed to the trappings of fame particularly, they've maintained their values and prevailed towards the terrains of late middle age. They know how to pace a record and populate it with hills and valleys. They'll never be hip but I imagine they've long since stopped caring about that.
Ultimately, Pearl Jam will always make me think of Matt, one of the best friend's I'll ever have. He passed a couple of years back, quite tragically for those who knew and loved him. As a mutual friend said to me, he had a knack of being very cool and not cool at all at one and the same time, which is some gift. I used to go round to his flat on Friday evenings, sometimes with other male friends and we'd drink beer and smoke dope and talk and watch TV and listen to music. We always had an incredibly good time.
I'm still grateful to him. It was an important friendship. It's a Friday evening now and I wish I were heading round to his. Instead I'm listening to Gigaton now in forcible quarantine like much of the world and in much less certain times and finding the experience of just listening to it strangely reassuring. It's a very solid album. I only wish Matt could hear it and experience these strange times. I dedicate these incoherent ramblings to him.
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