new music

“Everyone’s a critic looking back up the river”

And so begins Lightning Bolt – the first studio album from Pearl Jam in four years (the longest wait between albums for a band once regularly chucking em out every 18 months) and one of the albums that got the most plays on my stereo, in my car and on my iPod last year despite it only coming out in October.

I don’t think I’d awaited a release last year with as much excitement as “the new Pearl Jam” record. PJ fans had been updating numerous websites with snippets of information on “album 10” almost immediately after the release of Backspacer thanks to then hints that more music was imminent. Except it wasn’t. So for three and a half years there were snippets from interviews with different band members during promo tours for solo offerings, random gossip based on studio bookings and occasional live appearances of ‘new’ songs and debate as to what would make the album: would it include the throwaway “Ole” or even the occasionally-performed “Of The Earth” (one that was even touted as an album title)? All amounting to nothing.

And then, a countdown clock appeared on the PJ website and the waiting was over. Or at least we knew when it would be.

Still I went back and forth in my head – a new album from Pearl Jam could go either way, would it be a limp duck like Riot Act (a good album by anyone’s standards but, and this is hard for me to say as a fan, a bit of a whimper rather than the intended roar) or a return to form?

Then this appeared:

And then the journalists invited to hear the new album started getting excited. Talk of “Sirens” was louder than anything else. Surely no song could live up to the hype that was being thrown at this ‘modern Black’… but it did:

At first listen, it’s a generic power ballad, right? No. Listen to the lyrics. This isn’t some triumphant, fist pump ballad. Here Eddie Vedder sounds more emotionally fragile than ever and is admitting just how terrifying the finite notion of life can be, especially when you’ve so much you cherish. (Though I can’t listen to Sirens since the birth of my son without blubbing until tears hit my car seat)

When I finally got my hands on the slab of vinyl that is Lightning Bolt my excitement was at a peak. Thankfully it was worth the wait – this, to my mind, is their strongest effort since Yield.

Where Backspacer was a more ‘fun’ record and blasted past quickly and Pearl Jam sounded like the band rediscovering their stride – albeit victoriously – Lightning Bolt finds PJ angry again (“They’re taking young innocents/And then they throw ’em on a burning pile!”) and there’s nothing better thrown into the recipe for a Pearl Jam album than a bit of grief.

Musically this album is perhaps the most diverse they’ve released. While Vitalogy contains some pretty oddball leanings and No Code remains underrated in its deliberate sound change there’s something refreshing about the variety found on Lightning Bolt in terms of both the style and the journeys of the songs. “Pendulum” is a dark, brooding beast that never emerges into a monster ‘FM’ song but remains a menacing growl, “Infallible” is a track I still find hard to believe is a Pearl Jam original:

As part of the interviews that the band conducted ahead of the album’s release, Jeff Ament suggested that this album has much more of Stone Gossard’s imprint on it than any other PJ to date. If that’s true then hats off to Stone. The tunes hear are as tight as you’d expect of a band that’s into its third decade yet – perhaps for the first time – rather than being pulled back in to a structure or formula, are given room to breathe and wander down corridors the bands style had not previously allowed for. Whether that route is the near-Beatles like figures of Infallible or the swampy, blues of Let The Records Play, I’ve been playing them over and over since October.

This far into their career, Pearl Jam are an oddity among their contemporaries – they’ve never split up or lost members to drug addictions and suicides (though they did, for a while, have a bit of a Spinal Tap drummer issue) or experimented with a ‘dance’ album. They’ve done what they abruptly applied the handbrake on their success to do back in the mid-90’s – have a long, successful career. While a new Pearl Jam album won’t make the front pages as it would’ve done back in the 90s or hit the sales figures they were once associated with, it’s a given that it will contain more than a handful of tracks that will remain in their live sets for a few years to come (and the band are now more vital as a live act than a studio one). It’s unlikely now that they’ll release anything bad enough to embarrass their legacy. With that in mind it is, then, a real charge to hear them still pushing hard and refusing to rest on their laurels – while it took four years, Lighting Bolt does find them still punching hard, going for the over-reach and over-emote and turning out belters.

I hesitated in writing this post for a while as there was still one track that hadn’t ‘clicked’ for me and then, last week, while barreling down a country track “My Father’s Son” did just that (I still can’t enjoy “Johnny Guitar” or “Big Wave”on each listen). As such I can’t help but feel that this was my favourite release of 2013.

I recently ~~had the pleasure to hear~~ listened to the new Smashing Pumpkins album Oceania. Thankfully I did this via Spotify for had I paid more than the % of my monthly premium account it took to sit through it I’d have been a bit cheesed off.

I’m not sure why the media (think Rolling Stone, Pitchfork etc) took the strange step of giving this such a push – aside from the obvious industry politics. The biggest superlative I remember being thrown at it was that it sounded familiar, like Pumpkins of old. If, by that, they mean Billy Corgan not giving a fuck about the rest of the band then, yes, it may well be. In the past this meant playing all the parts now it seems not caring who he is playing with.

Billy & The New Kids

To be honest it’s one of the most disappointing things I’ve heard so far this year from the Big Name Bands. The only passing familiarity to old Pumpkins Gold (surely a worthy a blog of its own soon) is the vocal dynamics available thanks to Corgan taking on another female bassist. In fact, it’s the strange line-up of this band that means I tend to refer to them as Billy & The New Kids rather than besmear the name of that band that recorded Siamese Dream.

Let’s be fair though. The New Kids do a good job. They’re clearly capable musicians – how else would they get the gig – and hold their own. There are some good songs on hear. Some might even be among the finest stuff he’s peddled out in years -Pinwheels, Violet Rays and the title track Oceania in particular stand out. It’s a good country mile stronger than the dire ‘comeback’ album Zietgest. The problem is that while the New Kids try hard, it no longer feels like a band, more one man’s newest backing band. There’s no weight to it. A feeling of clout is missing.

Perhaps it’s for that reason – for the fact that of the faces under the ‘Pumpkins’ banner now only one looks familiar (though as a pale, slightly wrinkled, prune like version of the strangely endearing face that once sung of Spaceboys and Bullets With Butterfly Wings) – that this album isn’t doing it for me. Or, I imagine, a lot of fans.

So instead of sitting back waiting to be amazed I find myself listening, instead, for things to go ‘ugh’ over – like how when Billy sings the line “never let the summer catch you down” on Celestials it comes out as “never let the salmon get you down”.

I should point out that this is perhaps more upsetting as I’d quite liked some of the recent stuff put out as part of the Teargarden by Kaleidyscope songs. “Song For A Son” was a slab of what once made me listen to them in the first place.

If this were a Billy Corgan album (even if he called it Billy & The New Kids) or even with a new band, I’d receive Oceania – on this point, seriously; wtaf is with these ridiculous bloody names, you’re not coming across as mystical or mysterious just some strangely creepy old hippy uncle who needs to put the tie-dye shirt away – a bit more warmly. I’m sure critics and fans would be beside themselves too. But to call it a Smashing Pumpkins album despite that there’s only Pumpkin on it, reeks of what it really is: “The new album by Billy Corgan who knows it won’t sell if it’s not called Smashing Pumpkins.”

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just me that hates it when this happens. It’s not the first instance and sure won’t be the last – there’s the on going Guns N Roses chuckle and the new Courney Love’s Hole (though I saw that Hole had a genuine reunion that went without controversy recently) – instance of frontmen realising they can’t pack em in on their own like they do with the band.

Or perhaps it’s nostalgia. The biggest impact the new album had on me was to go back to the older, full-band albums and listen to those again.

Let’s finish this on a comparison.

VS my favourite (and, thanks to a Rolling Stone poll, I see the fan favourite):

Mumbling About…

Hear the circus so profound

In Spite Of My Rage