Article - Montreal Gazette - Album of the Week
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Album of the Week
Arts & Life
Pearl Jam fights its way back; Group finally shakes off its 'Morality Fulfillment Program'
Mark Lepage
Special to the Gazette
24 September 2009
Montreal Gazette
Final
D2
Pearl Jam Backspacer/Universal
Rating 4 out of five
Sleep easy, Kurt Cobain. One rock band has finally escaped your shadow.
That sound you hear as Gonna See My Friend crackles into action is the hairshirt
finally peeling from Pearl Jam's flayed torso. High time, as well: title aside, Backspacer feels like the first Pearl Jam in an age to
arrive without a formal apology.
Overstated, it's certain, but just as certain, the sense of self-imposed resistance in too many Pearl Jam albums. Kurt Cobain got inside their heads 18 years ago with all that acid he threw about punk/grunge "integrity" and corporate sellout.
To their credit as people, they believed it. Their status as a band, though ... you can't operate with that self-doubt and do the job assigned: soul salvation and world domination.
So in that clattering, balls-out opener, and in the catchy lead single The Fixer, we hear a release. Vedder's line might be applied to the career status: "Fight to get it back again!"
The drug references in Friend and Got Some aren't nearly as notable as the hunger on display. Choppy push-pull riffs, a pop-punkoid energy and brevity, a renewed willingness to be tuneful. This sounds like a band that just got out of its own way. The Fixer itself is rubbery and riffy, and aimed at an audience Out There rather than some inner Morality Fulfillment Program.
Johnny Guitar bristles with the right Quadrophenia chords. These speedy-on-their-feet three-minute songs don't feel three minutes because it's "wrong" to write longer anthems. They are honed to their concise edge and banged out. There's something like a warm triumph in Amongst the Waves for surfer Vedder, and a mini-Baba O'Riley moment in Unthought Known. The pop-punkoid Supersonic recalls the Undertones.
In Vedder, this generation's superior vocalist gets the leopard in his voice back, drops the martyr impulse, and roars out "yeah yeah yeahs!" in place of the mighty mumbles too often deployed over the past decade or so. And here's the serendipitous payoff: the passion, integrated, has free flow.
In three mortality ballads that at once bring weight and space to the album, he is the singer he should be. Just Breathe has that Going to California burnish and Vedder's softest vocal. In Speed of Sound and The End, mortality comes with gratitude and something that might be wisdom. Lavishly melodic and poignant, The End gushes without overstating, and closes the record with a maturity that will fill yearbooks and have older fans nodding in recognition. It's the autumnal finale to an end-of-summer
album. This is their real Vitalogy. Kurt Cobain would likely still hate it. This time, nobody would listen to him.
iPod: Gonna See My Friend
Photo: Mario Anzuoni, Reuters File Photo / Pearl Jam's Eddy Vedder at a concert in 2008: The leopard is back in his voice. ;
Arts & Life
Pearl Jam fights its way back; Group finally shakes off its 'Morality Fulfillment Program'
Mark Lepage
Special to the Gazette
24 September 2009
Montreal Gazette
Final
D2
Pearl Jam Backspacer/Universal
Rating 4 out of five
Sleep easy, Kurt Cobain. One rock band has finally escaped your shadow.
That sound you hear as Gonna See My Friend crackles into action is the hairshirt
finally peeling from Pearl Jam's flayed torso. High time, as well: title aside, Backspacer feels like the first Pearl Jam in an age to
arrive without a formal apology.
Overstated, it's certain, but just as certain, the sense of self-imposed resistance in too many Pearl Jam albums. Kurt Cobain got inside their heads 18 years ago with all that acid he threw about punk/grunge "integrity" and corporate sellout.
To their credit as people, they believed it. Their status as a band, though ... you can't operate with that self-doubt and do the job assigned: soul salvation and world domination.
So in that clattering, balls-out opener, and in the catchy lead single The Fixer, we hear a release. Vedder's line might be applied to the career status: "Fight to get it back again!"
The drug references in Friend and Got Some aren't nearly as notable as the hunger on display. Choppy push-pull riffs, a pop-punkoid energy and brevity, a renewed willingness to be tuneful. This sounds like a band that just got out of its own way. The Fixer itself is rubbery and riffy, and aimed at an audience Out There rather than some inner Morality Fulfillment Program.
Johnny Guitar bristles with the right Quadrophenia chords. These speedy-on-their-feet three-minute songs don't feel three minutes because it's "wrong" to write longer anthems. They are honed to their concise edge and banged out. There's something like a warm triumph in Amongst the Waves for surfer Vedder, and a mini-Baba O'Riley moment in Unthought Known. The pop-punkoid Supersonic recalls the Undertones.
In Vedder, this generation's superior vocalist gets the leopard in his voice back, drops the martyr impulse, and roars out "yeah yeah yeahs!" in place of the mighty mumbles too often deployed over the past decade or so. And here's the serendipitous payoff: the passion, integrated, has free flow.
In three mortality ballads that at once bring weight and space to the album, he is the singer he should be. Just Breathe has that Going to California burnish and Vedder's softest vocal. In Speed of Sound and The End, mortality comes with gratitude and something that might be wisdom. Lavishly melodic and poignant, The End gushes without overstating, and closes the record with a maturity that will fill yearbooks and have older fans nodding in recognition. It's the autumnal finale to an end-of-summer
album. This is their real Vitalogy. Kurt Cobain would likely still hate it. This time, nobody would listen to him.
iPod: Gonna See My Friend
Photo: Mario Anzuoni, Reuters File Photo / Pearl Jam's Eddy Vedder at a concert in 2008: The leopard is back in his voice. ;
Up here so high I start to shake, Up here so high the sky I scrape, I've no fear but for falling down, So look out below I am falling now, Falling down,...not staying down, Could’ve held me up, rather tear me down, Drown in the river
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Comments
Also, is Just Breathe going to go down as the SECOND Pearl Jam song to rip off Going to California?
for the least they could possibly do
Toronto 05/10/06 | Vancouver 04/02//08 (Ed) | Manchester 06/14/08 | Montreal 08/09/08 (Ed) | Montreal 08/10/08 (Ed)
Albany 06/08/09 (Ed) | Philadelphia 10/31/09 | Montreal 09/07/11 | Ottawa 05/08/16 | Brooklyn 04/07/17 (RRHOF)
Dana Point 09/09/17 (Ed) | Rome 06/26/18
A rivalry that's been dead (literally) for well over a decade and actually never even existed. How fucking lazy are these people? It's been 9 fucking records and they are still talking the same old bullshit.
I know he was positive towards the record but fuck this asshole. Fuck him for not having an original thought and falling back on the same old crap he grew up reading from every other reviewer of every other Pearl Jam record.
Fuck you Mark Lepage and suck my dick Montreal Gazette.
I think that he brought it up to show that the band has grown inasmuch as "not grown" because they were
never what Cobain made them out to be. They are still writing what they want to write and will continue to do so and in the process, they make wonderful music.