Riot Act
Yield - Binaural Sessions
No Code

Vitalogy
Vs
Gigaton
Ten (ten is probably better, but id rather hear gigaton)

Avocado

Backspacer
Lightning bolt.

96 - 03

oops wrong thread. gigaton gives me a sense of a misty freshness, with a touch of agitation and whelm.

got my turntable fixed a few weeks ago and im blasting Gigaton for the first time since it broke.

Side A is the best thing out there...

this is a typical Pearl Jam non-answer

That was a really nice interview.

"we're always recording"

"there's no plans as of now"

right

That’s probably Ed’s call the way the band works now.

They share music, record it separately or two and two. But Ed has to lay down lyrics, choose songs he wants to work on.

yeah those are good points and may explain the apparent contradiction

Most of the songs on this album feel over written.

Verbosity?

That and Ed's songs have felt laboured for a while to me now. I much prefer a song like Sleeping By Myself that has air to it than LB or WES that feels chiseled within an inch of itself. Retrograde from Mike feels too calculated. 0700 and Alright aren't natural sounding.

I guess I prefer my PJ to stretch its legs a bit.

I'm with ya.

I would argue this is Pearl Jam stretching its legs. Maybe not quite as much as No Code and Vitalogy, but certainly more than many if not most of their albums.

It's not just jamming it's about a collective. Take Faithfull and No Way. They both are cleary well written and constructed yet they don't feel forced the way WES and LB feel. Is that because Ed labours over them before bringing them in as opposed to the band jamming out the ideas together?

I was really trying to see this, for a while... but no, not even close.

i do not hear that in WES at all. actually of the 4 songs you
mentioned Faithfull is the one that has always felt like there wasnt a place for everyone

I do think that's definitely been a problem for Ed's songs in the past; he just doesn't seem to take into account when writing that a band's going to have to arrange around him, and for the most part doesn't seem to change his original part to fit that fact. But I don't think it's much of a problem on this record; it's hard to imagine Who Ever Said basically having two run throughs of its bridge in order to fit in everything Ed wants to say if it was cut on BS or LB, and it's hard to imagine O'Brien and the band letting Never Destination take 30 or 40 seconds to even really kick in on those records.

This just sounds like the effects of age to me.

For a lot of artists I like who kept it going, I’d argue that the passion remains as they age but that a sense of creative self-control and an expressive focus tend to replace youthful impulsion and abandon. I don’t mean this in terms of how raucous their sound is or how daring they are sonically, but rather how the music is birthed and how their expressive urges are processed. Over a period of time the balance between “cipher“ and “bard” reaches a fulcrum point.

I think that, at the age they are now, if the band tried to paint pictures the way they did in 1998 it would be a disaster. And if they faked it, it would be called Getaway.

What this album does is take their current strengths....the survivors of a thousand psychic wars who have taken risks and learned from them...and play to them. That it leans on those scars while thematically cultivating an album whose purpose is to issue support and encouragement for a fight that much younger people will have to fight...works really well.

nicely said

I am probably (midish May) going to start a Gigaton Guided Tour thread that I hope you at least drop in for on occasion (or just write for me)