LOVE SONGS BY PEARL JAM CODE

As predictable and yet fragmented as the critical reactions can be to Pearl Jam’s studio releases, their fanbase is one of the most divided yet simultaneously fervent and staunchly loyal beasts in the game. Thing is, the fanbase has played a role in all this as well. It’s all gotten a bit too clouded to wade through, and it’s simpler to be like, “Well, they haven’t mattered for a while.” Even so, all the hand-wringing can sometimes get in the way of the music itself, and I’d argue that all the competing takes on what exactly the story of Pearl Jam’s career is have become the primary reasons it’s too easy for people to write off a lot of their studio work.

LOVE SONGS BY PEARL JAM CODE

Yes, by and large any album post- Vitalogy pretty much only matters to fans, even if it’s kind of a crime that No Code gets left out of the discussion of great ’90s alt-rock albums.

Yes, they’re getting older, and that matters, as it does to the story of any band. You can’t really argue with certain stock elements of these cyclical observations of the band. The end result of all this is that the discussion surrounding Pearl Jam’s career and legacy can be made quite murky. What kind of band they become as they age out of these different phases and into what seem to be primarily healthy lives is a fair question, but it also strikes me that a lot of reviewers seem to fixate on Pearl Jam’s age almost as a veiled defense mechanism against their own graying hairs, given that a lot of the people who still give enough of a damn to write about Pearl Jam were coming of age when “Alive” ruled the airwaves. These days, the fact that the band members are all firmly middle-aged is an obligatory topic, and not without good reason - Pearl Jam was a band founded on a particular youthful brand of aggro-angst, and they abruptly shifted gears to a mid-career period of early-onset world-weariness. Accompanying this point is always some statement acknowledging their live show, and there might be something suggesting that the new studio recordings primarily exist as an excuse to put the band back on the road, where they really belong, or something. Inevitably, a point will be made about how Pearl Jam willed themselves away from the mainstream and made a slew of albums that only fans care about.

Sometimes people write about a band that seems ever-present even while their albums are sort of non-events sometimes people write about a band that seems to be lost out there in the ether, but is in reality a much more powerful force than you’d think and maybe, just maybe, is making better records than you’ve been led to expect. Some still stick to the idea that their first two or three records are their most focused and accomplished, and thus the only ones that really matter. Nobody really claims the band’s most recent albums are their best, but there’s a pretty noticeable divergence amongst critics who dig their back-to-basics approach, and those who have yawned their way through the last three albums. Some entirely dismiss anything that happened roughly ’95-’02, some argue those mid-era Pearl Jam works are wrongfully sidelined in the ’90s alt-rock narrative. Every fan knows the experience of talking to someone who goes, “Oh, they’re still around? I remember that one song they did…” before said person breaks into some ridiculous impression of the chorus from “Jeremy.” (Or maybe that was just me and a high school gym teacher, but I’ve got to imagine this is a semi-frequent phenomenon.) And even with them now falling outside of a lot of people’s attention spans, they’re still a quantifiably “big” band, between their ease at selling out arenas and the fact that their albums still move a respectable amount of copies (especially for a rock band in 2013, even if the numbers pale in comparison to their commercial peak twenty years ago).Īll of this means that there’s a predictable rhythm to what critics will write upon the release of a new Pearl Jam album. They entered the scene as one of the biggest bands in the world, and after a few years vanished from the mainstream audience radar, even though they continued, and still continue, to be an absolutely monolithic touring entity. Pearl Jam’s status as an artist can be a hard one to quantify.

Love songs by pearl jam