Kevin Davis wrote:Huell wrote:Whenever I get to that mid-point of Lightning Bolt where the album turns to slop, I always think 'This guy produced 'Go'....WTF'
joostone wrote:Blaming only BO'B for Lightning Bolt is unfair. That's like saying he's also fully responsable for the greatness of Vs or Vitalogy...
I think O'Brien has always been a "hitmaker"-type producer at heart, and it's easy to forget that those albums we all think sound so great were still big-money jobs that were produced more or less in the commercial vernacular of the time. But making a record with that mindset in 1993, with a commercially and culturally "relevant" band, was a much different enterprise than making a record with that same mindset 20 years later, in a dramatically different market, with a band who exists in a much different cultural sphere. The early '90's were a great time for artists like Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain who wanted to make these kinds of superficial integrity moves (like refusing to include "Better Man" on
Vs. because the producer dared to suggest it might be a hit, or hiring Steve Albini to achieve a deliberately raw, non-commercial sound) that were ultimately very low-risk, because at that time there was a multi-platinum market for high-profile bands who put on those airs. Not to say that the artistry in those records isn't 100% genuine, just that the environment was such that everyone could kind of have their cake and eat it too.
There seems to be no question that the band is a lot more complicit in his motivations now. Some of that is natural (they're in their 50's, to some extent taking principled punk rock stances against music on the grounds that it's overtly catchy seems kind of dumb), and some of it is probably just that when you get to a certain point in your career, you lose your instincts somewhat -- in 1993, Pearl Jam was leading the way for what other albums by other bands should sound like; in 2013, they're clearly not in that boat anymore, but there are also a lot of different precedents for what records by artists in that middle-aged legacy/veteran limbo should be.
Lightning Bolt was the career timeline equivalent for Pearl Jam that albums like
Landing on Water and
Human Touch and
Dirty Work were for Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen and the Stones, respectively -- in a lot of ways, it has to be hard for producers to know what to do with artists at this stage, and likewise for artists to really know what to do with themselves. Much like those previous examples, they seem to just kind of end up producing a weird facsimile of what that band would sound like in that particular cultural moment, and that reflect the producer's inherent tendencies.
