Pearl Jam, otherwise known as the greatest band on the planet, is on tour right now in support of Dark Matter, their most recent release, which somehow is one of the best albums they’ve ever done. Bands that had their first release in 1991 aren’t allowed to release one of their best albums in 2024. This doesn’t make any sense. They did it anyway.
Anyway, tickets to Deer Creek– fuck you, I don’t know what the hell the Ruoff Center is, it’s Deer Creek– were absolutely fucking ludicrous when the show got announced. Like $600+ for lawn seats.
I’ve been keeping an eye on them anyway, and … well, they’ll be at Deer Creek next week and tickets on the lawn (which, at Deer Creek, are still pretty damn good seats) are down to a much more reasonable $120 apiece, and even actual seats are at a price I’m willing to pay for them.
Now, note that I said “next week.” What do you think that implies about the actual date of the show? Or, more relevantly, the day of the week?
Because the Goddamned show is on a Monday. And I’m sorry, even building in taking the next day off, I absolutely cannot go to a rock concert on a Monday night when I am 48 years old. I just can’t. I have seen these guys in concert three or four times (I am so old I can’t immediately tell you exactly how many) and I have still somehow never seen them play Black live so I absolutely have to see them at least one more time before I die or one of them does, but I genuinely think I could get free tickets and the creeping existential horror that takes over when I even contemplate going out on a Monday night, much less to something I have to drive a couple of hours to, would keep me from going.
I mourn my lost youth. Not a lot; I didn’t really use it that well when I had it, but still.
A secret about me: my opinions cannot always be trusted.
I was wandering through old posts the other day, as I am occasionally known to do, and I came across a post where I described Pearl Jam’s last album, Gigaton, as “forgettable” and had very high praise for Binaural, an album that I just said was possibly my least favorite of their albums. So … sometimes my opinions change! This is a thing that happens. In Gigaton’s case I am much more fond of it than I was when it first came out (this has been known to be a thing with their work, I’ll admit it) and while I don’t have anything bad to say about Binaural I was apparently really in the mood for it when I wrote that other paragraph.
So if you want to take me saying that Dark Matter is Pearl Jam’s best album since Vitalogy with a bit of salt, I will not look askance upon you. I will say this: the last time I remember being this floored by an album, the last time it ran through my head constantly for two weeks, the last time I listened to nearly nothing else (other than a few Taylor Swift spins, mostly under duress) for this length of time since it came out, was the Dave Matthews Band’s Crash in 1996.
I will have this entire album memorized soon. I don’t think there’s a single weak track. There’s one song, Something Special, where you could make an argument that it belongs more on an Eddie Vedder solo album than a Pearl Jam album, and one song has a bridge that I feel like sounds like a transition into another one of their songs, but that’s all the criticism I can muster.
It’s amazing. It’s their best work in, literally, two decades. I cannot wait to hear it live, and if you have ever been a Pearl Jam fan you owe it to yourself to pick this up. I’d go through song by song, but somehow I have another hockey game to go to in a few minutes, so this is the best I can do for now. If I’ve still got it on 24/7 rotation in another week or so I’ll go ahead and do that. For now, Scared of Fear, Wreckage, Won’t Tell and Waiting for Stevie are my favorite tracks, but again: there are no skips here. I love it I love it I love it.
Yes, I know I haven’t reviewed the Pearl Jam album yet.
I fucking love it. I’ve been sitting on writing about it to see if the shine wears off and it hasn’t. This is their best album in a long, long time– definitely since Avocado and probably before that.
But I’ve been shaky and nauseous since I got home this afternoon after a day of feeling fine, and we’re still doing state testing tomorrow so I absolutely cannot miss work under any circumstances, so I’m probably going to go to bed obscenely early tonight. I’ll try and get a fuller review tomorrow, but if you’ve ever enjoyed a Pearl Jam album, you need to download this one right the hell now.
It hit us sometime this week that we hadn’t even considered the idea that our son might want to join us at the Pearl Jam Dark Matter Theatrical Experience. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it got me briefly looking at tickets again, which entertained me greatly. Our showing, the sole one available when the email went out from Ten Club in the first place, was nearly sold out, with only a few stray seats available. Ironically, one of them ended up being next to us, so the boy would have had a place to sit while he was simultaneously bored out of his mind and paralyzed by loud.
At some point they’d added a second screening and not told anyone. That one was happening at 8:45 PM, and it had sold about eight seats, which entertained me, as it suggested that a) everyone who wanted seats had bought them for the first show, and b) the vast majority of Pearl Jam fans are roughly my age, their late forties if not older, and had absolutely no interest in going to an 8:45 PM anything on a goddamned Tuesday.
I didn’t take the picture above– I snagged it from Reddit– but it gives you a pretty good idea of how the thing went. I am provisionally very happy with the album, more than I thought I’d be, and as a music lover the notion of sitting in the dark in a theater with a good sound system (critical, it turns out, and apparently some of the theaters weren’t well-chosen, but ours was fine) and listening to a new album by a band I love for the first time is pretty Goddamned appealing.
Unfortunately, the second listen, the one with the “mesmerizing visuals,” was a little half-assed. They put the lyrics on the screen, which was nice, as if you know PJ you’re already aware of how close to impossible Eddie can be to decipher on an early listen, but the visuals themselves basically amounted to a different high-res, movie-screen-sized screen saver for each song. They weren’t particularly thematically linked and they weren’t, like, in time with the music or reacting to it or anything. And for some reason the lyrics weren’t there for half of one of the later songs, for no clear reason. This appears to have been the print and not somehow the result of our theater, as there were other gripes about it on Reddit.
The point was the music, though, and again, I’m a big fan of the album. I’ll talk about it more once I’ve had a chance to listen to it at home– and, while I’m griping, it wouldn’t have killed them to put the name of the damn song up in the corner of the screen during the second listen, either– but it’s solid, and possibly their best work since Avocado. We’ll see.
There’s a new Pearl Jam album out this week, and unless something has gone very wrong, by the time you see this I should be sitting in the dark with a bunch of other flannel-clad nineties dorks listening to it. They’re doing this limited-engagement one-night-only movie theater thing, where they play the album, which is called Dark Matter, in complete darkness, and then play it again with what they’re calling “mesmerizing visuals.” So by the time I get home, I’ll have heard it twice, and hopefully I won’t stink of weed or have a headache. We’ll see.
Pearl Jam has been my favorite band for a very, very long time. During that time I have formed Opinions. And I saw a Reddit thread the other day that was asking if you could only keep two tracks from each Pearl Jam album, which ones would they be?
None of you care, I know, and this will absolutely take longer to write than will be worth it– I’m starting it on Monday night– but it’ll be fun, and oh also I have no intention of sticking to two songs, so here we go:
TEN (1991)
Best Song: Black, my favorite song, period. Indispensable Songs: Black, Jeremy, Alive, Release Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: This might be their only album I can name every song from.
Let’s be real: every song on Ten must be kept, but if you put a gun to my head, it’d have to be those four. I could maybe — maybe— do without Oceans. But I can’t.
Vs. (1993)
Best Song: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town, my second-favorite song. Indispensable Songs: EWBtCiaST, Animal, Daughter, WMA Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Go, because Pearl Jam also has Why Go and it messes with my head.
Vs. is another album that is burned into my head forever and I need damn near every song. I mean, maybe I could lose Glorified G in a pinch, or maybe Leash, but that’s about it.
Vitalogy (1994)
Best Song: Better Man Indispensable Songs: Better Man, Nothingman, Whipping, Corduroy, Bugs Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Stupid Mop, which I swear to God and sunny Jesus was called Hey foxymophandlemama, it’s me on the original album release.
Fun fact: Vitalogy is actually my favorite Pearl Jam album. I walked across Bloomington at midnight to buy a copy of this album on release date and then stayed up to listen to it, pissing my roommate off to no end. I am literally the world’s biggest fan of the song Bugs. I love this album.
No Code (1996)
Best Song: In My Tree Indispensable Songs: In My Tree, Red Mosquito, Off He Goes Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Red Mosquito
I didn’t like No Code the first time I heard it. I’m not sure what the hell I was thinking. I have every word of Red Mosquito memorized and I have no idea why I can never remember the damn song’s name. It’s literally in the first line. I’m not very bright sometimes.
Yield (1998)
Best Song: Wishlist Indispensable Songs: Wishlist, Given to Fly, Low Light, All Those Yesterdays, Faithful Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Brain of J.
I was in the middle of a heavy hip-hop phase when Yield came out, so it’s one of the very few Pearl Jam albums I didn’t pick up immediately upon release. And it took a while for it to click, as did a lot of the middle-career Pearl Jam albums. But it’s got some amazing stuff on it, especially when played live and Eddie can never get the words to Wishlist right.
Binaural (2000)
Best Song: Nothing As It Seems Indispensable Songs: Nothing As It Seems, Insignificance, Of the Girl, Parting Ways Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: n/a
Binaural is one of the few Pearl Jam albums where I’m known to skip tracks, mostly because most of my favorite songs on this one are better live so honestly I don’t listen to it very often. I think it might be my least favorite of their studio albums, which doesn’t mean I don’t like it (I listened to it today on the way home from work, in fact) but something has to be my least favorite album.
Riot Act (2002)
Best Song: Love Boat Captain Indispensable Songs: Love Boat Captain, I am Mine, All or None, Cropduster Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Absolutely fucking Cropduster.
Love Boat Captain was our song at our wedding, and was quoted in the program: Hold me, and make it the truth/ That when all is lost, there will be you. This entire album is indispensable.
Fun fact: I’ve spelled indispensable wrong every single time I’ve typed it in this post, including that time, where I accidentally put an “e” after the “d.”
Lost Dogs (2003)
Best Song: Down Indispensable Songs: Down, Yellow Ledbetter, Hard to Imagine, Dead Man Walking, Last Kiss Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Drifting, because they also have a song called Drifting Away
Technically a two-disc collection of rarities and b-sides and not a true studio album, Lost Dogs is still a fantastic collection even if the ludicrous Gremmie Out of Control and Dirty Frank are on it.
Pearl Jam (2006)
Best Song: Oh god this is hard World Wide Suicide Indispensable Songs: World Wide Suicide, Life Wasted, Gone, Come Back, Inside Job Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of:None on this one
My god, I love this album. Affectionately known as the Avocado Album, I saw them at Lollapalooza while they were touring for this release, and I love it. I love it all. Absolutely the best of their post-nineties releases.
Backspacer (2009)
Best Song: Just Breathe Indispensable Songs: Just Breathe, Unthought Known, Amongst the Waves Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Force of Nature
I also saw them on tour for this one, at Deer Creek. Backspacer has always felt like them stepping back and taking a breath after Avocado, but there’s definitely some good stuff on here. It’s super short at only 37 minutes, though, so there’s no way for it not to feel a little unimportant in comparison.
Lightning Bolt (2013)
Best Song: Sirens Indispensable Songs: Sirens, Swallowed Whole, Sleeping By Myself, Yellow Moon, Future Days Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Swallowed Whole
I don’t give Lightning Bolt enough credit, I think, because it’s organized so oddly– all of the best songs are in the back half of the album, and other than Sirens I don’t really love any of the first six or seven tracks. That last third or so, though, is phenomenal.
Gigaton (2020)
Best Song: Dance of the Clairvoyants Indispensable Songs: Dance of the Clairvoyants, Seven O’Clock, Comes Then Goes, River Cross Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Seven O’Clock
I really love Gigaton, although I admit I don’t know it nearly as well as many of their other albums– probably because I’m not buying the concert bootlegs as fanatically as I used to and so I don’t have live recordings of any of the songs on it. Every time I listen to it I’m surprised at how good it is, which you’d think I’d have gotten over after four years. It’s not as lopsided as Lightning Bolt, either, so I really don’t have an excuse.
And there you have it. I’ll have heard Dark Matter by now, or at least be listening to it, and I am a big fan of the first two tracks, but we’ll see. The environment might have me come out raving about it or if it’s not as positive as I want it to be, it might hurt my opinion of the album. I can also imagine a world where I’m tired from work (ILEARN started today) and don’t really want to be out in public. I’m sure there will be a review of it soon one way or another.
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