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I liked the muffled recordings that came out yonks ago better than the album. At heart, those are crooning songs, and his modern hiccupy singing does them no favors. Also, there’s really no reason to keep them uke-only, other than that it gave the project a theme that was comfortably creatively limiting, and served to keep it from requiring much effort beyond “relearn these old songs.”
Not that I want all those songs to get band treatments, but none of them are *served* by the complete lack of support. A gentle bit of piano on Without You would have been nice, for example. Light touch stuff...Love Love Love, Idylls of the King, and Game Shows Touch Our Lives by The Mountain Goats come to mind.
A lot of those songs were played for what I believe was the first time at a weird one-off solo show at UCLA in early 2002 (I think it was the All Tomorrow's Parties festival). It was about an hour-long set, comprised partially of these songs and partially of songs that would end up on "Riot Act" (all of which were more or less "new songs" at the time). Not sure if this is the "muffled recording" you're referring to, but the recording of this show was my introduction to a lot of these songs and yes, those performances are better. Eddie's voice was ten years younger, the songs were fresher, and the ambiance in the room was more natural, making the takes feel a bit less stilted -- in my opinion, not an uncommon discrepancy between live EV/PJ and studio EV/PJ in general.
That said, I think the songs are almost uniformly strong -- harmonically, melodically, and stylistically unique items in EV/PJ canon, some of them among the more compositionally compelling things Eddie has written from a strictly nuts-and-bolts, chords-and-melodies perspective. That there is no "reason" for it to be an all-uke album just feels like the kind of statement that could apply to any project that imposes this type of superficial limitation on itself, and the idea that it was left as such more or less out of laziness is just a regurgitation of the default criticism leveled at all modern Pearl Jam-related things -- they don't want to put any effort into anything, moneygrab, etc. Fair in general considering the evidence, but not the case in every individual circumstance and in my opinion not the case here -- these songs were conceived of and composed this way, at a time when Eddie was engrossed in the instrument as a musical tool, admittedly pushing it beyond its functional utility for the sake of the creative exercise, one which is perhaps doomed to result in a project of limited appeal and scope but is nevertheless a genuine reflection of its moment in time.
Of course, some of that is diluted a bit by the fact that it wasn't recorded and released until ten years after many of the songs were written, but it's also not surprising to me that the project wasn't given a lot of attention a time when Pearl Jam were on the precipice of a new album and huge tour (and were still a consistently creatively active band in general), nor is it surprising to me that he didn't try to shoehorn all of the songs into the band's repertoire -- and the fact that he didn't, over the course of the three albums that followed their inception, along with the fact that he chose to include "Can't Keep" on the uke album when it had already been effectively "used," in my mind lends credence to the idea that the uke-only arrangements were not a product of laziness but the vision for these songs, as a collective group, all along.
Ultimately, I recognize the album's limitations and appreciate the fact that someone would tire of it after a few tracks, but I like almost all of the songs and am happy they are gathered together as a collection, though a 2002 version of the same album would no doubt have been even better.
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