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2 Chicago Reviews: 1 good and 1 crap. 2 reporters see the same thing differently!
Veddernarian
Posts: 1,914
Here is the good:
Tempo
Pearl Jam luster remains
By Greg Kot, Tribune music critic.
18 May 2006
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Final
1
Pearl Jam is not only the last and biggest survivor of the alternative-rock '90s, it's also one of the unlikeliest.
Fame, the media and Ticketmaster never sat well with the Seattle quintet, and by the middle of the last decade, this multimillion-album-selling band appeared in danger of imploding. It disappeared for a while, then resumed making albums for a shrinking audience.
Yet Pearl Jam's following on the road remains undiminished, as a sold-out concert Tuesday at the United Center reaffirmed. Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready and Matt Cameron have become wealthy rock stars, but an iron-clad bond with their audience persists: their ticket prices remain among the lowest in the business for an arena act, and they routinely offer prime seats at cut-rate service fees to their fans. Though Pearl Jam has endured, it isn't quite as volatile. Perhaps it's to be expected that the shows no longer have the death-defying us-against-them-spirit of 15 years ago.
But at the United Center, love handles started to show underneath the middle-age band's T-shirts and flannel. McCready's solos tended to go on and on, emerald-green lasers pierced the darkness, "Alive" brought out the spinning mirror ball, and the shadow of a classic-rock dinosaur was glimpsed. But it would be premature to say that Pearl Jam has gone soft. Its concerts still have the air of a journey rather than a predictable routine. Vedder still sings like a baritone troubadour, with his notebook and a bottle of wine getting him through the night. McCready and Gossard remain mighty riff machines, and Cameron and Ament remain a remarkably agile rhythm section. The opener, "Release Me," served as a moving invitation, and then a fist closed around a new batch of tough, taut rockers: "Worldwide Suicide," "Life Wasted," "Severed Hand," "Comatose."
Vedder scored with a solo acoustic Beatles gem, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," and the band revved up the grunge-era hits whenever there was a lull. From "Jeremy" to "Daughter," these songs still resonate. "She holds the hand that holds her down/She will rise above." In those lines, Vedder found the tragic poetry of his generation, and also its resilience.
Some will argue that Pearl Jam has tumbled from those heights on recent albums. But what was most heartening about Tuesday's two-hour-plus concert was the new songs, and the passion the band brought to them.
Tucked inside a long encore, "Come Back" emerged as a Pearl Jam anthem in the making, with a twist: Riding a rich Ament bass line and cushioned by Hammond organ gospel chords, the song brought out Pearl Jam's inner Otis Redding.
Here is the bad & ugly:
Features
Pearl Jam can't keep up with furious '90s pace: Grunge rock survivors strike a gallant pose, but best days are past
Jim DeRogatis
The Chicago Sun-Times
18 May 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
Final
43
PEARL JAM
At United Center
- - -
Is Pearl Jam the new Grateful Dead? The comparison has been prompting vigorous debate on fan Web sites for some time, and it has started to filter into the press because of the most obvious similarities.
Both bands could fill arenas even as their album sales lagged. Both inspired legions of obsessive fans to collect recordings of every live performance. Both espoused plenty of hippie rhetoric and proudly treated their followings as extended families, and both benefitted from late-career comebacks overseen by Clive Davis -- with Pearl Jam in the midst of its own now courtesy of a new self- titled album on Davis' J Records.
Most of these points are admittedly superficial. For me, the biggest connection comes in the form of a mystery: There was no denying the almost religious devotion accorded Pearl Jam on Tuesday at the United Center during the first of two sold-out shows. But it was impossible for this skeptic to hear how the often sloppy, lackluster or generic sounds generated onstage could possibly prompt such rabid enthusiasm.
The sheer physicality of Pearl Jam's tours in the early 1990s was enough to convert any doubter, and the "us against the world" vibe was very real at the Chicago Stadium in March '94 and Soldier Field in July '95 in the midst of the band's epic battle with Ticketmaster.
But the Last Surviving Seattle Grunge Group has been on cruise control ever since, when what it really needs is to follow a reverse speed limit.
Pearl Jam simply shouldn't be allowed to play slower than 140 beats per minutes.
Things started fast and furious on Wednesday, with the group unleashing a flurry of roundhouse blows via the hard-hitting openers "Release," "World Wide Suicide," "Life Wasted," "Severed Hand" and "Comatose," the last four from its new album, and all of them stronger live than on album.
These new songs may not have had the anthemic cell-phones-in-the- air qualities of "Evenflow," "Jeremy" or "Alive," which came later on, but at least they had a pulse.
"Hello, Chicago," Evanston native Eddie Vedder said in the midst of this opening assault. "Can't talk now -- we have work to do!"
But the musicians' work ethic began to drag more than the clock- watching laborers at a city construction site as the group shifted into slower, more turgid and just plain boring numbers such as "Given to Fly," "Low Light" and "Corduroy."
And the show never regained its momentum as the band continued alternating among pounding rockers, lugubrious ballads and meandering jams through the rest of the long, long night.
Vedder is playing a lot more guitar these days, and that's always a bad sign in a band that already has enough axes: Think of Mick Jagger trying to disguise the fact that he needs more stand-still breathing time between bouts of frontman athleticism. Even worse, Pearl Jam resorted to hoary arena-rock cliches such as flashing green lasers worthy of Boston or Journey and shout-outs to beloved fans and long-since-retired hometown hero Michael Jordan.
The lately hirsute Vedder was in fine though typically mush- mouthed voice, though it's impossible to resist noting that the bushy beard does make him resemble a young Jerry Garcia.
Bassist Jeff Ament remains a powerhouse and the unheralded soul of the band. But drummer Matt Cameron was either poorly amplified or under-caffeinated, and the six-string tag team of Mike McCready and Stone Gossard was annoyingly self-indulgent, unfurling endless high- register "wheedle wheedle wheedle" solos rather than the impressive rhythm-guitar pummelings of old.
Then there were those jams. Granted, these were shorter than anything the Dead ever tortured us with, but the extended vamps on "Evenflow" and "Daughter" were pointless and distracting nonetheless. And detours into covers of the Beatles' "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and the Who's "Baba O'Riley" were even more pandering and more dated than the praise heaped upon the Chicago Bulls.
Listen, fellas: The Bulls' last championship season is now a decade behind us. And so, I'm afraid, are the best days of Pearl Jam.
Tempo
Pearl Jam luster remains
By Greg Kot, Tribune music critic.
18 May 2006
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Final
1
Pearl Jam is not only the last and biggest survivor of the alternative-rock '90s, it's also one of the unlikeliest.
Fame, the media and Ticketmaster never sat well with the Seattle quintet, and by the middle of the last decade, this multimillion-album-selling band appeared in danger of imploding. It disappeared for a while, then resumed making albums for a shrinking audience.
Yet Pearl Jam's following on the road remains undiminished, as a sold-out concert Tuesday at the United Center reaffirmed. Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready and Matt Cameron have become wealthy rock stars, but an iron-clad bond with their audience persists: their ticket prices remain among the lowest in the business for an arena act, and they routinely offer prime seats at cut-rate service fees to their fans. Though Pearl Jam has endured, it isn't quite as volatile. Perhaps it's to be expected that the shows no longer have the death-defying us-against-them-spirit of 15 years ago.
But at the United Center, love handles started to show underneath the middle-age band's T-shirts and flannel. McCready's solos tended to go on and on, emerald-green lasers pierced the darkness, "Alive" brought out the spinning mirror ball, and the shadow of a classic-rock dinosaur was glimpsed. But it would be premature to say that Pearl Jam has gone soft. Its concerts still have the air of a journey rather than a predictable routine. Vedder still sings like a baritone troubadour, with his notebook and a bottle of wine getting him through the night. McCready and Gossard remain mighty riff machines, and Cameron and Ament remain a remarkably agile rhythm section. The opener, "Release Me," served as a moving invitation, and then a fist closed around a new batch of tough, taut rockers: "Worldwide Suicide," "Life Wasted," "Severed Hand," "Comatose."
Vedder scored with a solo acoustic Beatles gem, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," and the band revved up the grunge-era hits whenever there was a lull. From "Jeremy" to "Daughter," these songs still resonate. "She holds the hand that holds her down/She will rise above." In those lines, Vedder found the tragic poetry of his generation, and also its resilience.
Some will argue that Pearl Jam has tumbled from those heights on recent albums. But what was most heartening about Tuesday's two-hour-plus concert was the new songs, and the passion the band brought to them.
Tucked inside a long encore, "Come Back" emerged as a Pearl Jam anthem in the making, with a twist: Riding a rich Ament bass line and cushioned by Hammond organ gospel chords, the song brought out Pearl Jam's inner Otis Redding.
Here is the bad & ugly:
Features
Pearl Jam can't keep up with furious '90s pace: Grunge rock survivors strike a gallant pose, but best days are past
Jim DeRogatis
The Chicago Sun-Times
18 May 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
Final
43
PEARL JAM
At United Center
- - -
Is Pearl Jam the new Grateful Dead? The comparison has been prompting vigorous debate on fan Web sites for some time, and it has started to filter into the press because of the most obvious similarities.
Both bands could fill arenas even as their album sales lagged. Both inspired legions of obsessive fans to collect recordings of every live performance. Both espoused plenty of hippie rhetoric and proudly treated their followings as extended families, and both benefitted from late-career comebacks overseen by Clive Davis -- with Pearl Jam in the midst of its own now courtesy of a new self- titled album on Davis' J Records.
Most of these points are admittedly superficial. For me, the biggest connection comes in the form of a mystery: There was no denying the almost religious devotion accorded Pearl Jam on Tuesday at the United Center during the first of two sold-out shows. But it was impossible for this skeptic to hear how the often sloppy, lackluster or generic sounds generated onstage could possibly prompt such rabid enthusiasm.
The sheer physicality of Pearl Jam's tours in the early 1990s was enough to convert any doubter, and the "us against the world" vibe was very real at the Chicago Stadium in March '94 and Soldier Field in July '95 in the midst of the band's epic battle with Ticketmaster.
But the Last Surviving Seattle Grunge Group has been on cruise control ever since, when what it really needs is to follow a reverse speed limit.
Pearl Jam simply shouldn't be allowed to play slower than 140 beats per minutes.
Things started fast and furious on Wednesday, with the group unleashing a flurry of roundhouse blows via the hard-hitting openers "Release," "World Wide Suicide," "Life Wasted," "Severed Hand" and "Comatose," the last four from its new album, and all of them stronger live than on album.
These new songs may not have had the anthemic cell-phones-in-the- air qualities of "Evenflow," "Jeremy" or "Alive," which came later on, but at least they had a pulse.
"Hello, Chicago," Evanston native Eddie Vedder said in the midst of this opening assault. "Can't talk now -- we have work to do!"
But the musicians' work ethic began to drag more than the clock- watching laborers at a city construction site as the group shifted into slower, more turgid and just plain boring numbers such as "Given to Fly," "Low Light" and "Corduroy."
And the show never regained its momentum as the band continued alternating among pounding rockers, lugubrious ballads and meandering jams through the rest of the long, long night.
Vedder is playing a lot more guitar these days, and that's always a bad sign in a band that already has enough axes: Think of Mick Jagger trying to disguise the fact that he needs more stand-still breathing time between bouts of frontman athleticism. Even worse, Pearl Jam resorted to hoary arena-rock cliches such as flashing green lasers worthy of Boston or Journey and shout-outs to beloved fans and long-since-retired hometown hero Michael Jordan.
The lately hirsute Vedder was in fine though typically mush- mouthed voice, though it's impossible to resist noting that the bushy beard does make him resemble a young Jerry Garcia.
Bassist Jeff Ament remains a powerhouse and the unheralded soul of the band. But drummer Matt Cameron was either poorly amplified or under-caffeinated, and the six-string tag team of Mike McCready and Stone Gossard was annoyingly self-indulgent, unfurling endless high- register "wheedle wheedle wheedle" solos rather than the impressive rhythm-guitar pummelings of old.
Then there were those jams. Granted, these were shorter than anything the Dead ever tortured us with, but the extended vamps on "Evenflow" and "Daughter" were pointless and distracting nonetheless. And detours into covers of the Beatles' "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and the Who's "Baba O'Riley" were even more pandering and more dated than the praise heaped upon the Chicago Bulls.
Listen, fellas: The Bulls' last championship season is now a decade behind us. And so, I'm afraid, are the best days of Pearl Jam.
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
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
but please, lets not flood his email inbox with "you dickhead PJ was great blah blah blah"
we who were there know PJ was great. and that JDR probably missed a fair amount of songs waiting in line for a slice of connies pizza
"Pearl Jam simply shouldn't be allowed to play slower than 140 beats per minutes"
"the group shifted into slower, more turgid and just plain boring numbers such as "Given to Fly," "Low Light" and "Corduroy."
This guy obviously wanted the 1994 Teen Angst PJ to show up and nobody else. How can you review a concert of a band you dont follow or even like? Clay Aitken could put on the best show of his life, but if Im sent to review it, I will probably trash it because it does nothing for me. But is that fair? If the sold out arena goes home in awe, was it a shitty concert because I threw up?
However, it is to be expected. You cant have 1 person review a ton of concerts and expect to "feel" what the fans feel everytime, for every band. But reviews like this make me think its a waste of print to send someone to review a concert of a band he doesnt even appreciate.
(and this is not sour grapes over a bad review... im not like that at all. Its just the "Clay Aitken" reference I made... I have no idea what Aitken fans want, and to tear him apart because a few songs are "boring" according to me is wasting peoples time to read my thoughts, especially if one of those "boring" songs is a HUGE ~fan~ favorite)
Halifax, Summer 2008... they return!
The Sun Times guy is obviously a Cubs Hater. Note that I said "cubs hater" and not "sox fan". There's a difference.
That's where his obvious bitterness comes from.
"Things started fast and furious on Wednesday, with the group unleashing a flurry of roundhouse blows via the hard-hitting openers "Release," "World Wide Suicide," "Life Wasted," "Severed Hand" and "Comatose," the last four from its new album, and all of them stronger live than on album."
With that, Jim DeRogatis has officially become the first human being alive to call "Release" a hard-hitting song. Congratulations, Jim. You've finally found something completely original to say where Pearl Jam is concerned.
Steve
Excellent point. He gets credit for stating the title correctly, too. EDIT---are you saying that Release isn't hard-hitting? It's not fast and furious but to some, it has a deep meaning. Some would call it hard-hitting. I can't decide if you're being sarcastic or not???
The Trib guy wrote 'Release Me' and a mistake like that is a little annoying.
- EV
Really. WTF? They opened with Release on Tuesday, not Wednesday. Thanks for pointing that out.
The errors are unsettling.
...personally I think the added effects are pretty cool to see.