Pearl Jam's debut album, released in 1991, stood on the other side of the dividing line from Nirvana's Nevermind and defined Seattle's music scene. In doing so, they both--inadvertantly or not--pointed rock and roll in the direction it would have to evolve to survive hair bands, boy bands, and hip-hop.
It is a monument to internal struggle, an album loaded with searing guitar work, seismic drums, and everything that made classic rock classic back before Ronald Reagan. The lyrics are selfish, anxious, lonely, and seething with alienated rage. Every teenager who wasn't part of the fun bunch in 1991 secretly knew that Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were singing about them--and the ones who were part of the fun bunch bought this album because MTV told them to. It stayed on the charts for five years, in an age where top 40 was gaining a chokehold on the music industry by tossing a new pop fluff stooge up to #1 every month. It was still selling millions of copies when Kurt Cobain killed himself and the new "next big thing" that had been "grunge" was proclaimed dead.
There are no bad songs on this album, and the order of the tracks is simply right. From edge to edge of the sound landscape, Pearl Jam used this album to redefine what it meant to "rock." The band poured sweat and angst into every note, pulling back tight to do quiet songs like Oceans or Release, but still leaving the feeling of intensity riding just under the surface. Black and Alive are those rare, difficult gems: the explosions in slow motion, the power ballads with fangs. Eddie Vedder didn't give up until he had put every raindrop's-worth of sorrow and pain into the recording, but it comes off like he almost didn't give a damn if you heard it or not: he just had to get it out before he was swallowed in his own misery.
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- Once
- Even Flow
- Alive
- Why Go
- Black
- Jeremy
- Oceans
- Porch
- Garden
- Deep
- Release
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After the end of Release, there is a bizarre instrumental. If your CD player is on repeat, you'll notice that it's the same off-kilter instrumental that prefaces Once. Even though you can actively listen to it and appreciate all of it, the album can also be played over and over as background music, without that nauseating feeling of the passage of time that you might normally get from hearing the first track again. You never think, "Shit, is it starting again?"--you just wonder if, perhaps, you've heard this song before, perhaps somewhere else.