old thread archived here

listen to the album and share your thoughts

Seems this one turns 20 today.....happy birthday to the most powerful record from this band.

Wont forget my first time with it.

Today? This was a fall release, right? Maybe November. Lest we forget, someone should look it up.

Released October 19, 1993 according to Wiki. Recorded March-May '93.

So, 20 years from inception? I'm not getting into a discussion of when something is considered life.

Yes, lest.

yeah i was way ahead of that....anyway, 20 years of an amazing record.

It sounds very actual for me.

Still love this record.

They really worked hard on the arrangements for this album and it pays dividends. They really took that to the next level from Ten with songs like Animal and Rearviewmirror - those songs are so tight in terms of how the different parts work together, but yet they groove. The next time they appeared to work on that interplay was for Avocado and I also think it paid off for the first half of that album.

It is a shame that they moved so far away from the riff based song-writing since this has always been their strength. Every song on the album is characterised by a memorable riff (either guitar or bass) which is the centerpiece of the song. This approach seemed to be almost completely watered down / abandoned by Binaural which has very few riff based songs or even memorable riffs.

This isn't to say Binaural is a bad album, but I've always felt that the band is better at writing a song around a riff than writing songs. There wasn't really anything that stands out on Backspacer (Force of Nature could have been a 5*+ song if it had a decent riff) and, despite attempts, Avocado doesn't really have many great riffs either - Life Wasted riff is a bit weak, WWS needs a riff instead of that stupid e-Bow shit, Severed Hand is quite good, Marker is a good groove but I'm not sure it's a riff then the album falls off the edge of a cliff in terms of quality and there are no riffs either. On Riot Act, I'm probably one of the few people that like Save You but I think that is a good riff, Ghost is sub par and there's nothing else there apart from You Are which I really like.

I think I like the life wasted riff more than you do, but I'm mostly on board with this

(waits for someone to tell us that we don't know what riffs are and are using the word wrong)

I'll wait too. I was trying to be careful with my language as I was someone might say - "well Insignificance has a verse riff and a pre-chorus riff and it's a great song" - but the point is that it used to be that the riff (which I'll define as a regularly repeating motif or one that sets the tone of the song) almost was the song and was certainly the hook - inter alia Even Flow, Alive, Jeremy, Go, Animal, Daughter, Last Exit, DTE. Songs like Breakerfall have little riffs embedded in the song but I wouldn't be thinking "OMG I HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO PLAY THAT ON GUITAR (or bass)". In fact that's probably a pretty good test since I haven't bothered learning any of their post-Riot Act songs on guitar except for the End.

And I don't hate the Life Wasted riff and it works well once the other guitar punches in and with the bass and drums - part of my "weak" comment it is due to awful guitar production - I watched the HD version from Storytellers on Youtube the other day which made me like the song more:

Great comments...yeah, the whole riff-arrangement stuff from this album is incredible...to think they did a complete different record two years before with Ten is astonishing too.
i think every record have some of this idea of the band just rocking out, but the groove seems to be missing in a lot of ways..but you can still hear some of this ideas in Binaural ( Insignificance, breakerfall) Yield ( Faithfull ), and specially in Avocado with Life Wasted, Severed Hand and even a great mid tempo song like Army reserve.

I said in the backspacer thread that Johnny Guitar remind me of Vs and it might have to do with this too...the groove that this record have.

Hey everyone, let's actually listen to Vs!

Great use of room noise on this record, especially Rearviewmirror. Not a lot of records this heavy utilize that, and they really, really should.

Probably the pinnacle of unthinking, underwritten cathartically howled Pearl Jam. Also one of only two records that actually seem to adhere to the "woe is me" label the band got slapped with. But I'm always more impressed than I expect to be by the simplicity of the aggressively self-protective moments on this record. Like a wounded dog seeking refuge under the back porch, unwilling to come out and terrified to let you come in after it.

What do you mean by use of room noise? This is one of my favorite sounding PJ albums.

Go: That false start to Go (or whatever it is) is so good. The menacing and ominious and important without sounding self important. My favorite part may be that little guitar noodle at 13 seconds, and then that brief pause where they're holding that bended bass note and the drums count in. Ridiculously good. As great as Go is, the intro may in fact be the best part of the song. I just listened to it like 5 times.

I'm a lyrics guy, but I could care less what Eddie is screaming about during the pre chorus. You know, he actually doesn't scream that much on Go, which makes a really nice counterpoint to the music. I never noticed that before. The music really does the screaming for him.

The shimmery 'pplllleeeaassseeee' that comes up from under the music. Mike's solo, the siren sounds in the guitars.

Everything about this song is great

Animal: See go. I could care less about the lyrics, although some of the lines are striking. As great as this riff is, I think the hanging spaces that appear in the verses, and the places where some of the instruments drop out really help make this song--the way it punches in and out of open spaces. The angry jazzy guitars on the chorus are amazing.

I'm sure I've asked this before, but there's a piano in Animal, right?

More great soloing from Mike.


Even though I tend to prefer Life Wasted/WWS today (20 years will play out a song), there is no better 1-2 opening combo than this. This is all the anger and disappointment and self-awareness of the most fiery moments of ten without the theatrics

hearing people count down the songs, drumsticks hitting the floor, Little moments that reveal the sound and space and shape of the environment the music is being recorded in.

I think.

Daughter: You know, the transition from animal to daughter is pretty sudden, especially given the gentle way Daughter starts, but this is a pretty hard hitting song for an acoustic number. I love the tone of the guitars here (pretty much everywhere on this record).

This is such a disarmingly earnest song that it really invites you in, even though the subject matter is about personal alienation. They were so good at that on these first two records.

Nice fadeout.

There are definitely some moments of weaker song writing on this record, but the playing is so good.

Glorified G: Such a stupid song, and too heavy handed to really be good satire (although given some gun owner rhetoric, maybe its not dumb enough to be accurate satire) but such a great riff. The closest pearl jam came to actually sounding like music can be fun until Who You Are.

GG and Dissident have the fuzzy tones on their guitars that I really came to identify with them.

Eddie's smarmy moaning leading into the outro is a nice subtle touch you don't notice unless you have headphones on.

As good as Ed is here, I like how he's not overpowering the mix. When they are firing the band is excellent and shouldn't be buried.

Ohh, nice roaring fade out with the guitars that i never really noticed

Dissident Poor dissident. It's a great riff, nice fuzzy playing underneath it-the song that I think became the template for 'discordant things playing against each other' or whatever stone said in SVT. I think that's the problem. So many moments in this song would be mined in later songs (often more successfully) that 20 years later that Dissident just often feels redundant.

I really like how eddie sings 'when she had contact with the conflict', with his voice dropping in a dismissive way at these really precise moments. We remember Eddie for the screaming and the grand gestures, but he can be wonderfully subtle on this record.

I love his moaning during the instrumental bridge with the guitars roaring over it--lots of struggling to penetrate the fog/wall of sound moments on this record. They used to be be masters of that and largely dropped it from their repertoire. I'll never understand why.

Gotcha, that's what I was thinking too. Just curious about his thoughts there.

It's more about hearing the space that exists around the sound, which sounds like something Tom Waits would say but is really just about setting room mics up a good distance from the instrument. You capture the sound bouncing off the surfaces of the studio, creating a unique type of echo that translates as physical distance. When you listen to a record and it almost feels like you're in the room with the performer (without a binaural approach), it's room sound that is causing that to happen. It's far more commonly utilized on softer or acoustic performances than it is on rock records, where punch and volume are king.

Some of that almost undefinable quality that Rearviewmirror has when it goes into the chord-punch sections of the first half, that never quite translates live, is due to a combination of ringing, open strings and cymbal work in a room-sound heavy recording. On the other hand, what you can sometimes sacrifice with room sound-heavy recordings is presence...a reality which is used to great effect on Ed's voice in Animal.

WMA: The bass and percussion in this song is excellent, and the guitars (and Eddie) really color it in nicely. Some very nice funk inspired playing I'd love to see return. They give the whole thing a hard hitting ethereal quality to it that shouldn't necessarily make sense but does.

Eddie's political songs were so strident, but he was a young, angry, empathic, and sincere, so you forgive it. But it does make some of these songs feel dated--not that they don't work, but that they were clearly written by people who don't exist anymore (which is probably a good thing. At a certain point you want people to learn subtly--especially since we have a document of youthful intensity)

This is an overlong song, though. And this is not a record that's really favorable to long trace moments. And you sometimes get the sense that they aren't necessarily sure what to do with all the time they've allotted themselves. But maybe that's just my attention span.

This song fades out on a weak moment

Blood: Another angry funk moment that feels so young in a way that Go or Animal do. But the funk grounds the anger, and while this song is a primal scream, the music helps lighten the mood so it's not just self-pity.

Again, while these are not always my favorite songs, I definitely miss this element in their playing.

I'm glad Eddie doesn't scream like this anymore. It gets a little too close to screaming for screaming's sake. The restraint in Go and Animal is what helps make those songs more compelling.



When glorified G--dissident--wma--blood is the weakest stretch on your record you did something right.