Dark Matter on Amazon and Apple Music

Yeah, agree he was a little vague on where he came down in his opinion.

I'll read reviews of Pearl Jam albums, but I don't tend to put much stock in them one way or the other because I'm not looking for a recommendation, and I'm not looking to place a Pearl Jam album in the context of their career or of the larger musical landscape. I already know, based on a thirty-year track record, that I am likely to respond to what this band produces. And, if it ever happened that a Pearl Jam album came out and I didn't respond to it initially, it's going to get a lot of rope before I decide there's nothing there for me.

A music review is more useful to me if it's making me aware of an artist with whom I'm not familiar. That ship sailed long ago with respect to Pearl Jam. Whether a reviewer raves about a Pearl Jam album or pans it, it's not going to have any bearing on my level of interest in that album once it becomes available to me.

One of the reviews linked here did something that is a pet peeve of mine, describing Pearl Jam as "not relevant." This word gets thrown around a lot, but it is almost always missing a modifier. "Relevant" to whom? Perhaps Pearl Jam is not relevant to the reviewer, or to the people the reviewer socializes with or to the people with whom the reviewer has a discourse online, all of whom are very likely to be similarly situated to the reviewer and often unaware that there are a lot of people who think differently than they do. But Pearl Jam is relevant to me, and they're relevant to tens of thousands of other people in this fan club, not to mention hundreds of thousands of people who pay to see them perform. We may not matter to the reviewer's narrow definition of the culture, but we are real people whose interests are part of the culture nonetheless.

CarryTheZero said:

I agree. I’m bugged too by the relevant descriptor. Maybe relevant means driving the culture, but that’s a narrow description.

It always makes me think of when a reporter asked then-president Bill Clinton whether he was relevant given Republican victories in the 1994 midterms and he replied, "The Constitution gives me relevance."