Works:
Lightning Bolt
Pendulum
Yellow Moon

That's it really, though some people like Mind Your Manners.

All those songs sound good live.

All things considered I haven’t seen that many of these songs live: Mind Your Manners, Sirens, Lightning Bolt, Infallible (don’t even remember that), Pendulum, Yellow Moon, Future Days in the 3 LB era shows I attended (Bk 2 in 2013, Global Citizens in 2015, MSG 2 in 2016).

Pearl Jam apologized with Gigaton. Just took 'em a while.

At this moment I look back on LB as the best that the band could do at that time. Fair enough. It's not for me and I'm okay with that.

The first 5 songs plus Pendulum are all fine.

Just delete the rest.

just this and gigaton to finish my LAL tour (though I dont think i started posting song by song until no code). spotify mixes and new headphones (that have been uncovering a fair bit)

getaway feels a bit too much like a demo. I really like what jeff is playing, and eddie’s vocals melody is catchy. He should be singing in a lower register (that, maybe more than anything) is what gigaton largely brought back). The real thing this song is missing is the second guitar. For too much it sounds like they are playing the same thing. with really good headphones you can make out a faint second guitar doing something different but you need to REALLY listen. the best parts of the song are when you can clearly hear both stone and mike. this would be so much better if it carried throughout

agree

I will agree that MYM could be even better with more bite in the guitars (or more differentiation). it doesn’t have comatose’s savagery, though it is aiming for something different. everything else is fantastic. Eddie’s lyrics (which are some of his smarter and more insightful) melody, delivery (especially the self-realized verse/choruses), mike’s solos, the intro/outros, the call and response.

it is exactly the kind of song a middle aged parent should write about the turmoil of the obama years, especially post occupy

I do quite like the music in MFS - the bass work is fairly unique in the catalog, and there is a creeping, unsettling menace in the guitars I like they also dont have elsewhere. and the juxtaposition with the zombie pina colada bridge is very cool. Eddie lets this one down, both the lyrics (especially the lyrics) but the verse melody, too. And again the register is too high. Maybe Lightning Bolt made that apparent for gigaton. Most of the best songs here are in that lower register.

and usual production comments apply

sirens is such lovely melodramatic heart on sleeve nonsense. Eddie makes it work in part because his voice can make almost anything sound true, and because it is an outlier (along with future days). I really like the big dramatic sweep of the music, and the way eddie’s performance tracks alongside it. Interesting choice to go huge rather than intimate, given the subject matter. Really love stone’s accents here.

the one issue I have with sirens is mike’s solo (lightning bolt contains a weird mix of many of my favorite and least favorite mike performances). The song really needed a first rate solo, and this isnt it. Something akin to wishlist/I am mine would have hit the spot.


the way eddie sings the fear goes away, into the ‘ah ha oh oh’ singing at the end is so lovely


Sirens is a song I have definitely been rediscovering in my post gigaton catalog reassessment/resurgent interest

Lightning Bolt may well have become my favorite post yield/pre gigaton favorite pearl jam song. Like FoN it has a rocky start. pretty great lyrics throughout (except for the actual lightning bolt analogy, which is a little obvious) though the weakest point is the first verse. the rest of the band contributes in a huge way throughout, so the parts that are just eddie’s guitar are kind of thin. plus some odd vocal choices at the start

But when the ‘she comes after thee..’ part, and the rest of the band kicks in we are off to the races. this song builds and builds and never lets up. the moments where it ratchets back down it immediately ratchets up the tension. the song feels like a literal roller coaster.

Mike’s first chorus solo (the two parter) is a favorite, as are the spacey accents throughout. The church bell climax, the hair raising electric edge to so much of the performance (like there is an actual charge in the air), Eddie’s orgasmic surrender at the end, the REM like second verse. Everything else in this song is incredible

until the fade out, obviously...

this is actually mining fairly similar territory to the fixer, plugged into the anthem template. fixer is more interesting musically, but this has way more effective catharsis

i wish you jerks cared more about those two songs so I could justify putting in the time unpacking that song. but the venn diagram of people who give a shit about both those songs is pretty small

I really like what they are trying for in infallible, a song I never seek out but am surprised by when it comes on. The production flattens out the dynamic verse/chorus juxtaposition that is the key to the song. And eddie doesnt soar as much as he should, in part because that juxtaposition isnt fully realized.

the verse music is really fun and interesting. And these are very smart lyrics

pendulum, probably more than any other song, is done a huge disservice on the album. It sounds so much huger and the atmosphere envelops you the way the studio version doesnt quite execute. But I love the music (jeff’s seductive baseline) and the way the song gently leads you down its one way street. The uh uh uh uh part is good, but it has the flat, loudness problem of so much of the album where each part just struggles to be louder than what came before, rather than in tension with each other

swallowed whole is also a good song presented in a wholly unflattering way. The guitar tone on eddie doesnt work, and a song that should feel open and free (and outdoors) sounds cloistered. imagine if this was on into the wild?

I do like eddie’s lyrics and melody. the bridge is quite good, and mike’s solo almost works (it, like everything, isnt quite free enough).

I love the outro and the way it feels like a plea to keep reading a book that is about to close

My thoughts on Sirens remain the same: it’s two songs - one musically approaching the land of Nothing As It Seems, and one vocally approaching Come Back. I don’t think they work well together but separately they could have both been amazing.

I like Lightning Bolt and always have. It has a certain catchiness that works best live (especially because the pay off on the build up doesn’t even make the record), but it definitely does what it intends to do, which is to catch that lightning in a bottle.

LTRP is a fun minor song. I quite like the swampy, roadhouse bluesy pop vibe of the whole song. Of the recent songs that really leaned into a pop aesthetic for the chorus (infallible and unemployable come to mind) it works best here, even if I prefer infallible overall.

nice to let mike cut loose at the end here since they take it away everywhere else

ha - i totally forgot that this faded out too. god damn it

i like the finished product more but I like that observation about the root ambitions of Sirens