Hail Hail! This is the Pearl Jam Albums Poll

"Nothingman" is mine

I actually performed it in a 'band' for a one-off show in high school. my PJ-obsessed friend sang it and it was like euphoria for him.

I am actually looking at tickets for the Jax show now. if they become affordable, I may go again.

Vitalogy has some great ballads. 'Better Man' is great. I find it's the hoary rockers that let it down a bit.

Is it even worth me venturing much further beyond Yield/Binaural?

I've made a good playlist out of the best from the s/t and Backspacer.

i'd listen to that

There are easily 20 great songs btwn the post-Binaural albums.

i made playlists of my favorite songs from each era (divided by drummers), these are my Matt Cameron picks:

1. Greivance
2. Can't Keep
3. Mind Your Manners
4. The Fixer
5. Undone
6. Big Wave
7. Light Years
8. You Are
9. Johnny Guitar
10. Gods' Dice
11. Love Boat Captain
12. World Wide Suicide
13. Breakerfall
14. Supersonic
15. Get Right
16. Sad
17. Thumbing My Way
18. Insignificance
19. I Am Mine
20. Man Of The Hour
21. Sleight Of Hand
22. Gone

http://narrowcast.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-imaginary-pearl-jam-box-set-4.html

s/t and Backspacer are really, *really* worthwhile listens

Riot Act has some good tracks but I dont enjoy that album v much personally speaking, kind of has a bad vibe for me

oh and Lightning Bolt is p great too

I'm sure I've linked elsewhere but these guys do great work in marrying up the official bootlegs to any (non smartphone) footage they elicit, results are nearly always super watchable.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn-WEUogXBFbwfm3nmGN3rw/videos

riot act does have a bad vibe. some of my favorite pj songs tucked into its sprawl though ("green disease," "get right," "you are")

of course two of the songs i named are cameron-written, huh

oh ha i'm gonna see pearl jam with my mom at jazz fest in a few weeks, sick

felt like him doing Lennon's "Imagine" was a bit rote

Eddie's a real cornball too, but mostly he makes it work. I do not want to hear this, though.

Off He Goes might be my favourite PJ song. No Code definitely my favourite album, though they're all strong, tbh. Sirens off Lightning Bolt is such a ridiculous song, right on the edge of being fatally over-the-top - and yet it still works so well.

favourite Pearl Jam song is a good question... Maybe I Got ID?

I'm quite surprised Vitalogy won, it's the album that turned me off them after being bang into Ten and Vs. I remember it being this wilfully obscure mish-mash. I was only 15 or something, sure there's loads of good stuff going on that I didn't get.

But y'know, I was already a Mr Bungle fan so wasn't a stranger to wilfully obscure mish-mashes.

It's got some great tracks but it's a typical 90s eclectic 'let's do it all and mix it all up' kind of record (the kind of thing I used to love back then), but it's also really jarring. This disconnected hodge-podge of big shouty rock tracks, stoic goth-funkers, ballads and weird sketches. Def got some of their best work: 'Better Man', 'Corduroy', 'Immortality'. Not a fan of any of the rockers on here - all just sound awkward and laboured. I do like the weirdo tracks, all of them, from Pry, To to Aye Davanita. Even Bugs I used to think was teh funneh back then.

I recall Tremor Christ was the one I liked best.

Yeah, I Got ID would be in my top two or three; love the spectral Neil Young guitar solos throughout. I wrote a thing about PJ's 10 best tracks the other day for the Guardian and described the song as a grungey take on Just My Imagination; certainly, it's the best of Eddie's heartbroken-streetperson-mumbling-to-self works.

Aye Davanita is a great track in its own right, but there is SO MUCH TO SKIP on Vitalogy.

I love Vitalogy. "Last Exit", "Tremor Christ", "Spin the Black Circle", "Nothingman", "Betterman", "Not for You", "Whipping", "Corduroy"....even "Satan's Bed", while not a great track, has a good verse riff.

Listening to it now - gotta admit the three opening tracks have all been banging.

I'm just not keen on things like Spin The Black Circle, Blood, Last Exit. I like 'Lukin' though - that's Pearl Jam doing heavy rock really well.

Ha well, I thoroughly enjoyed those four rockers that opened the record, now Nothing Man is on and I'm getting all yawny.

I really really don't like it on No Code the way Sometimes fades out and this horrible big brute of a track follows it up. I love 'Sometimes' and 'Hail Hail' is fine; they just don't sit nicely next to each other.

I love that!

although point taken about their rockers. They're better at what that Grantland critic called "midtempo plus"

Done with first listen of Vitalogy in 20 years - pretty good! Definitely far smoother/more accessible than my recollections, and for all the obviously self indulgent moments it never really drags.

My least favourite bits were actually the two "---Man" tracks - never really liked PJ when they got too soppy.

those are like the best songs. Better Man is one of their best songs. You are wrong!

No. They are like a tired farmer singing about tractors.

Strange, even as a hard rockin' teen, I always preferred Pearl Jam when they weren't being deliberately spiky and shouty. Bar a handful of exceptions, mid-tempo plus rockers, ballads, funky jams and weirdo outliers were what they were best at in my view. Not sure why that is.. Vedder's got a good hoarse shout but it feels strained and I never feel like the band gels very well when doing this.

I'm listening to Yellow Ledbetter for the first time in probably 20 years. It's really good innit?

i love mikey's guitar sound on that. still gets me in the feels

I got id might be my favorite ... either that or Off He Goes, or Red Mosquito, or Dissident

also Just Breathe makes me cry big fat blobby tears

Going again tonight. Thx stubhub. Both tickets combined were less than one purchased on Ticketmaster at face value.

my favorite pearl jam song is "sad," which, wow, i'm still extremely mad that it's a b-side

thats a goodun

I love "Brain of J", the verse riff is one that's weirdly aggro and almost heavy metally for PJ. great chorus too.

PJ never had a lot of Zep worship, Hendrix, Neil Young, etc, were more their thing, but Yield has some songs that dialed-up the Zep a bit more. a little overboard in "Given to Fly" which is basically just the verse of "Going to California"

yeah Jack Irons era brings out some Zep vibes

We got "Glorified G" tonight!

so glad this thread has stayed high

I've listened to nothing but PJ for the past two days because of this thread. Stoked for the eventual trax poll!

My #1 is "I Got Id" but seeing how only Ed and Jack play on it I may put "Corduroy" up top

those are both good candidates

I found Lightning Bolt to be a disappointment (barring the opening tracks) after really liking the previous two

'Brain of J' is an example of an excellent hard'n'fast PJ song. For the most part I don't think they sound beefy enough to pull that sound off, but that and 'Lukin' are great.

In Berlin for the gig on Thursday and I’m excited like a kid at Xmas.. actually my first time in the city and I’m normally diving into the history books pre trip but all I’ve been doing is listening to their discography- from 1991-2006 not a dud I reckon. Last time I saw them was in Trieste a few years ago and they blew me away with a personal top 5 concert -.

sorry man, i know my context is just vastly different but i have to register that i'm just legitimately blown the fuck away that someone can be in berlin or trieste and be "excited like a kid at xmas" by a pearl jam concert in 2018.

i am right there with fionnland in spirit, i would be the same way!