I'm Eddie Vedder, Bitch!

Originally posted by Santos L. Halper:

Originally posted by amnesiac:

Originally posted by Big KC:
…and this is my best record in a decade.

So you don't own OK Computer?

Vedder was on that record? Was he the one typing the Fitter Happier lyrics into the Speak & Spell?

Sorry, I guess I wasn't really paying attention. Thought Big KC was talking about himself…

After three listens I can now say I like it. A handful of very good tunes, nothing too out there. I seem to remember trying hard to like Binaural and just never getting there.

I also ordered it through TenClub and got the New Years Eve 1992 CD which it's pretty cool, 'cept for the sound quality.

Originally posted by yinzer:
pitchfork can really go and make love to itself. i guess ed can't sing like the clap your fucking i'm so indie it hurts and say yeah lead singer. to which i say, good.

Oh man that is funny….

From Rolling Stone

Pearl Jam Pearl Jam (J Records)

Wartime, for everything else that's wrong with it, brings out the best in Pearl Jam: the power-chord brawn, contrary righteousness and metallic-KO songwriting sense. The band's second and third albums, 1993's bluntly titled Vs. and 1994's Vitalogy, are as good as modern rock-in-opposition gets: shotgun guitars, incendiary bass and drums, and Eddie Vedder's scalded-dog howl, all discharged in backs-to-the-wall fury and union. This album, Pearl Jam's first studio release in four years and their best in ten, is more of that top electric combat.

With a difference. The Pearl Jam on Pearl Jam is not the band that famously responded to overnight platinum by going to war with the world. Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron are now fully at war in the world, unrepentant veterans of the campaign trail (the Vote for Change Tour) and right-wing crucifixion (the "Bushleaguer" uproar) who have made the most overtly partisan – and hopeful – record of their lives. For Vedder, the 2004 election was not a total loss. "Why swim the channel just to get this far?/Halfway there, why would you turn around?" he demands in the first song, "Life Wasted," in a ragged, run-on bark. And it's all forward ho from there. As immediate and despairing as breaking news from Baghdad – "World Wide Suicide" opens with a newspaper casualty report – Pearl Jam is also as big and brash in fuzz and backbone as Led Zeppelin's Presence.

That's not just rock-critic shorthand. However you define grunge music, Pearl Jam didn't play it. They were, from jump street, a classic rock band, building their bawl with iron-guitar bones and an arena-vocal lust that came right from Zeppelin, early-Seventies Who and mid-Eighties U2 (with distortion instead of the Edge's glass-guitar harmonics). But Pearl Jam have not been this consistently dirty and determined in the studio since they subbed for Crazy Horse on Neil Young's 1995 Mirror Ball. I own two complete tours' worth of Pearl Jam's official-bootleg concert CDs, and this record's five-song blastoff ("Life Wasted," "World Wide Suicide," "Comatose," "Severed Hand" and "Marker in the Sand") is right up there in punch and crust with my favorite nights in that live series (Seattle, 11/6/00, and New Orleans, 4/8/03, to name two). And whenever the guitars take over, which is a lot – Gossard and McCready's slugging AC/DC-like intro to "Life Wasted"; McCready's wild wah-wah ride in "Big Wave"; the way he cracks Vedder's gloom in "Parachutes" like heat lightning – it reminds me that Gossard and McCready deserved to be on our 2003 "Greatest Guitarists" list. Permit me to admit it here: I screwed up.

That's more confession than you'll ever hear in the Bush White House. But talk-show pit bulls will be disappointed to find that Vedder doesn't waste his breath naming names here, except for a glancing reference to "the president" in "World Wide Suicide." There is blame, but it's spread all around. "Now you got both sides/Claiming killing in God's name/But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently," Vedder sings in "Marker in the Sand," from inside Gossard and McCready's crossfire and the saturation bombing of Ament and Cameron. There is dread too – lots of it. "Army Reserve" is a midtempo elegy for the real Army Reserve, the wives and children who serve in worry, behind the lines. (The dark harmonies crowding Vedder's low, grainy vocal feel like ghosts in waiting.) And "Unemployable" is just half a story, with a soaring-melancholy chorus. The song ends before the guy with the pink slip can find a new job. But Vedder's opening scene – the fist with the ring that says JESUS SAVES, flying with helpless anger into a metal locker – is lesson enough. In multinational capitalism run riot, the bottom line doesn't care about religion or party line. We're all expendable.

And we're all accountable. The politics on Pearl Jam are not those of right or left but of engagement and responsibility. In "Life Wasted," Vedder at least partly mocks his old self, the one that wore success and the leverage that came with it like sackcloth: "Darkness comes in waves, tell me/Why invite it to stay?" But there is only determined optimism in Pearl Jam's superb finish, "Inside Job." The song starts quietly, then climbs and peaks like a combination of "Stairway to Heaven" and the Who's "The Song Is Over" – a mirror image of Vedder's stumble through each line from night into light. "I will not lose my faith," he promises under thunderclap guitars, with such assurance that even if you don't agree with anything else on this record, you believe him. (DAVID FRICKE)

I love the record.

It's going to rock so hard & so good live.

Check 'em out on Letterman last night:

Life Wasted

Originally posted by The Artist Formerly Known As grotty:
I love the record.

It's going to rock so hard & so good live.

Check 'em out on Letterman last night:

Life Wasted

They hung around and did a 45 minute set after the taping.

Setlist: World Wide Suicide, Comatose, Severed Hand, Marker in the Sand, Gone, Unemployable, Present Tense, Do the Evolution, Why Go, Porch

http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/live_on_letterman/

Originally posted by ggwâ?¢:

Originally posted by The Artist Formerly Known As grotty:
I love the record.

It's going to rock so hard & so good live.

Check 'em out on Letterman last night:

Life Wasted

They hung around and did a 45 minute set after the taping.

Setlist: World Wide Suicide, Comatose, Severed Hand, Marker in the Sand, Gone, Unemployable, Present Tense, Do the Evolution, Why Go, Porch

http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/live_on_letterman/

That's a really good vid - high quality - THX for link.
The last 3 would be my ideal set close.
They are raving about this on Synergy.

is anyone else excited that the neo-90s is being ushered in by the same bands that ushered in the 90s? because I am. this pearl jam stuff is great, and it reminds me of '92. New Pumpkins album being recorded this summer as well.

2006 is shaping up quite well.

Thanks for the link. I love the new record too. It definitely beats the crap out of Binaural and Riot Act.

I love the PJ hate too, that's just more PJ for me. Troll all you want, but they write good music, and kick bloody ass live.

Originally posted by vassego:
kick bloody ass live.

Amen to that. Non-believers have no idea what they are missing.

Matt Cameron was a HUGE addition. They may never put another record like TEN, but as a band, they are better than ever right now.

Originally posted by conorh98:
Am I the only one that's not into this album? I don't understand the bashing of their past few Sony albums. They were much better than this one. At least with those we got to hear some experimenting with new sounds. I thought this effort just sounds like old PJ trying to sound like all the other new bands today. Perhaps the songs with catch me live like a lot of others have, but so far, I'm really not impressed.

36 Pearl Jam shows (and counting) and I have to agree that I'm not into this album, either. I used to always get upset with people who said that they didn't like them after Vs., as I think Vitology, No Code, and even some of Yield was very good. But I think Binaural is awful and I own about everything that you can buy PJ wise, including all of the albums on vinyl.. and I never bought Riot Act becuase I thought it was so terrible… not even to complete my collection. I act like it was never released. ;)

Bottom line, I think it's a decent album and maybe (like all good albums usually turn out to be) I just need to listen to it more.. but I have doubts.

I'm glad they are still around, still playing live, and still making albums… but I don't know… I look at Dave Grohl (from the same era) and think of how the Foo Fighters make good hard-driving rock records. Some of the songs are a little poppy, but still.. I just think they do it better than PJ.

oh well.. I'm not getting rid of my stickman tattoo anytime soon, though.

Originally posted by samsfresh5:

Originally posted by conorh98:
Am I the only one that's not into this album? I don't understand the bashing of their past few Sony albums. They were much better than this one. At least with those we got to hear some experimenting with new sounds. I thought this effort just sounds like old PJ trying to sound like all the other new bands today. Perhaps the songs with catch me live like a lot of others have, but so far, I'm really not impressed.

36 Pearl Jam shows (and counting) and I have to agree that I'm not into this album, either. I used to always get upset with people who said that they didn't like them after Vs., as I think Vitology, No Code, and even some of Yield was very good. But I think Binaural is awful and I own about everything that you can buy PJ wise, including all of the albums on vinyl.. and I never bought Riot Act becuase I thought it was so terrible… not even to complete my collection. I act like it was never released. ;)

Bottom line, I think it's a decent album and maybe (like all good albums usually turn out to be) I just need to listen to it more.. but I have doubts.

I'm glad they are still around, still playing live, and still making albums… but I don't know… I look at Dave Grohl (from the same era) and think of how the Foo Fighters make good hard-driving rock records. Some of the songs are a little poppy, but still.. I just think they do it better than PJ.

oh well.. I'm not getting rid of my stickman tattoo anytime soon, though.

I'm not a great fan of the new album, but even to consider that Foo Fighters comes close to where Pearl Jam is, you've totally lost me.