Pearl Jam - C or D?

Never been more than a casual fan, but just watched PJ20 on Netflix. Kinda hard not to admire the way they've done it as a band.

It's not that this band is incapable of writing a memorable tune, they just don't have enough great ones IMO. Too many songs/riffs that are not quite there.

i disagree but w/e

So much of this band is not quite there, but its ability to connect despite that sort of redefines "there." It's almost as if it's never been able to go the full R.E.M., whether by design or by default, but usually does fine with what it has.

you're gonna have to define "the full R.E.M." here

Hmm. I guess PJ has yet to abandon hard rock? They've never had to release a "return to rockin'" album. In some ways, the electric guitars and big drums are like a comfort blanket, but maybe they prevent the band from doing more interesting things.

Just spitballin' here.

PJ always had much more of a default meat and potatoes hard rock thing than R.E.M., though. plenty of quiet songs and acoustic shows, but those were always clear deviations from the rockin' norm. Eddie goes off with his ukulele if he wants to do something quiet.

I do think it's true that they could stand to take a few more chances - they've not released an even mildly "experimental" (by mainstream rock band terms) record since, I dunno, Binaural? I did appreciate how snappy the last one was, mind.

Pearl Jam's default hard rock may not have hindered the group but may have hampered it. What made REM so great was its ability to make an album like Out of Time or Automatic the norm. Pearl Jam has yet to release its own paradigm shifting album, but it may be too late for that.

Like, you can hear the band (or at least Vedder?) pushing against constrictions, but it's subtle, unlike REM, or Radiohead, or even U2, who have made radical reinvention the norm.

fwiw there's definitely a pretty wide perception that the more offbeat sounds on the albums from Vitalogy through Binaural were too out there for most of their audience and deliberately pared down their fanbase, and every album since then has had lots of 'their most radio-friendly/Ten-like album in x years' reviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-QYAWXK7fo

How many other acts with a "pared down" fanbase can fill the places this band does? I'd counter that PJ is one of the few bands (like I guess Wilco?) which has somehow kept its old fans onboard despite it all. There are still Wilco fans who go most nuts for "AM" stuff.

the offbeat stuff in the old days was more Eddie being pissed off and contrarian than experimental. and it was more annoying than anything

Now that the band are so tight & chill, I'd be interested to hear what they could do, experiment-wise

yeah PJ's shunning stardom was kind of a 'playing the long game' survival mechanism -- i do wonder if they'd be playing to bigger crowds, or even crowds as big, now if they'd kept making videos and never made any remotely weird records or fought ticketmaster etc.

it's a shame Matt Cameron seemed to push them into slightly new territory at first and then settled into something more predictable, which i'm sure will just continue now that he's got Soundgarden to do their Soundgarden-y time signature stuff with again.

how is Automatic For The People a paradigm shifter -- fully articulate lyrics to pin down the mope?

btw PJ has been killing it with ballads for at least fifteen years.

I dunno, I kind of prefer PJ as a barnburner rock band than, well, whatever they were in the early years. I've long wanted to just make a mix of their punchy uptempo songs for car listening. Maybe today's the day.

yeah, i was surprised when "Off He Goes" killed the No Code poll or whatever, i think the slower and more lyric-driven the more their songwriting weaknesses become apparent.

we really should do a PJ trax poll someday -- they don't feel like 'ilm darlings' but there's enough fans on here to make it worthwhile and the catalog is certainly deep enough

I'd be into that.

"Off He Goes" sounds to me like Vedder attempting to write his own version of this, written by one of his idols:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfjNRz-ZoBM

always sounded like a Neil pastiche to me but that's perceptive, hadn't heard that song before. Eddie's Finn fandom is definitely one of the coolest underestimated influences of his.

I was the big Crowded House fan in my crew, so hearing Eddie and the boys do other Finn Bros stuff like "I See Red" persuaded a couple to check out the House comp..

btw PJ has been killing it with ballads for at least fifteen years.

at first i thought i agreed with ship but i guess my favorite songs off their records are almost always ballads or ballad-ish. "low light," "light years" (albeit this one fights mightily with ultimate pj barnburner "insignificance"), "thumbing my way," "nothingman," etc.

you like "Come Back"?

i have been thinking about a PJ trax poll for a long time, it would be good

Come Back is great, imo

you like "Come Back"?

haven't heard the self titled or backspacer yet

oh man! You should!

urgent and key!!!

i guess i've always meant to but my pj phase passed a long time ago, a product of having listened to them a ton in high school to the point of memorizing the records. will still visit them

xpost I consider Out of Time and Automatic paradigm shifters in that they redefined REM as a chamber pop group rather than a rock band. And this is what totally broke them into the mainstream, no less.

If someone does a tracks poll, please don't limit to studio albums. There are some great tunes that were not on their proper albums. Just a heads up.

Just finally watched PJ20. For some reason, I always thought it was more of a live document with some interview bits. Didn't realize it was a full-on interview/archival footage fest. A+

PJ are the one band where I prefer the live recordings to the studio albums - ill never BJ another traditional batch of new songs by these dudes, onstage even the lamest material finds full voice and gets scuffed nicely by the audience

PJ20 is great, yeah. Seriously, 15 year old me PEED her pants at some of the early footage

Josh, we disagree. R.E.M. were never a rock band in the sense that your binary defines them.

on Murmur they were recording chamber pop albeit more rhythmically interesting than the usual.

I get that. And R.E.M. was pretty all over the place. But if I had never heard the band and you told me they were a rock and roll act, then played me Out of Time or Automatic, I wouldn't get it. While REM was always more, rock pretty much gets at the first several records: guys with guitars over drums. The fact that those two albums turned out to be the biggest sellers, by far, gets at something even more unusual about them. And regardless, PJ has never come close to putting out something similarly divergent, however much it might at times share a similar vocabulary.

Echoing previous comments, the self-titled is really good for the most part. "Parachutes" is easily my favorite Gossard tune. Only track I could do totally without is "Gone."

Yeah Parachutes is beautiful. I actually really like Gone. I dunno if I could cull anything off that album, it's one I can easily repeat-listen

While REM was always more, rock pretty much gets at the first several records: guys with guitars over drums.

I just can't get with this at all. Like, that's some really vague defining going on there, to make this theorem work. And really, the last thing Pearl Jam need to do is to be more like U2 or Radiohead (fuck me please no).

And REM, up to and including Automatic, were always critics faves, Pearl Jam have *never really been so. They're coming from different sides of the binary you're trying to set up. And Eddie, from my experience, is pretty much the antithesis of Stipe, and thank fucking god much as I love a fair chunk of REM.

Anyway, they're announcing a new LP soon, aren't they?

there's a countdown clock, supposedly to that announcement and/or a new single in a couple days: http://pearljam.com/countdown#PearlJam2013

I was using "like" as it should be used: Pearl Jam could have been like REM or U2 or Radiohead, which is not the same as Pearl Jam should sound like. They're all very different, very popular bands. But from my perspective, the others have done more to shake up their sound than Pearl Jam has, which is not to say that Pearl Jam has not shaken up its sound, just that it defaults pretty safe. Which is perhaps why PJ in theory is a little better than PJ in practice. I've gone through phases of listening to the band a lot, and phases of nada, but I've seen the band live a bunch, which appears to be its milieu.

Anyway, you can definitely hear how REM has been an influence on both PJ and Radiohead, even though neither sounds much like REM. You're right that PJ was never a critic fave, but they've also been pretty comfortable in their little niche. I've never heard the radical searching and shifting that the aforementioned acts have done (esp. U2, like them or not), and maybe PJ doesn't want or need to do that. But then, I've never liked "Yellow Ledbetter," which for some is the ultimate PJ song but for me is the band at its most safe and generic.

Still thinking out loud here - I have no grand "theorem" - but in many ways I do think PJ has pushed itself politically as a means of challenging its fans. The music may not veer far, but the band has been pretty in your face about its interests, maybe even more than Radiohead and certainly more than U2. I saw a Vote for Change show in Grand Rapids, MI, and when Vedder thanked the Dixie Chicks for playing a show the same night in Ohio, some fans booed, and he, to his credit, paused the show and chastised the haters. I was struck by the reaction, since PJ does not disguise its politics, yet still attracts the odd meathead or two. I mean, I've seen Springsteen booed a few times, too, for similar reasons, but he's much more subtle than PJ with on-stage politics.

(I do think it's revisionism to think REM was received as much more than a really good rock band for the first half of its career, though.)

Pearl Jam could have been Grand Funk Railroad

Pearl Jam shaking up their sound is exactly where they fucked up - this is a band that lost their mainstream audience to Creed.