Gigaton: Official album thread

[EJ]

'Toiling in LA' was actually the working title for the Album at one point

Ed came up with it at Ursawa late one evening during their 5-day mid- 2nd session holiday

Wonder how many seconds Sleeping By Myself was toiled over.

[evenslow]

ST took a very long time to finish. They slaved over that thing.

The reaction to that was BS and LB, in which they did a few weeks at a time and called it a day.

I don't think this approach was a problem for Backspacer, b/c they were going for a quick and concise style of recording from the outset. Your mileage may vary on the results, but it was an interesting way for that band at that time to conduct an album.

The real problem was/is Lightning Bolt. They clearly did not spend enough time honing the material for that. Two real sessions over a couple years and BOB couldn't wait to put his stamp of approval on it and send it to the masses. In retrospect, I bet they'd even agree that it could use a few more two-week sessions.

[Bammer]

This album thread is about to be 10x longer than the Backspacer thread

[evenslow]

This album thread is about to be 10x longer than the Backspacer thread

seeing as the backspacer thread started 3&1/2 years after the release of the album, that probably makes sense.

[Hypnos]

Sometimes it amaze me how little credit you give the band over their output, both aesthetically and creatively. BS & LB are their pop phase, that became aparent in the design & concept. I mean, just look at the artwork, both consist in drawings and vectors. Light, superficial, immediate. They are fully aware. Now, with Gigaton its time to move on from that sound and aproach.

[scrub12]

This album thread is about to be 10x longer than the Backspacer thread

Album itself is like twice as long too.

[evenslow]

Sometimes it amaze me how little credit you give the band over their output, both aesthetically and creatively. BS & LB are their pop phase, that became aparent in the design & concept. I mean, just look at the artwork, both consist in drawings and vectors. Light, superficial, immediate. They are fully aware. Now, with Gigaton its time to move on from that sound and aproach.

BS and LB have different motives. LB is not a pop approach. it's unfortunately a lazy approach - PJ by numbers. not the worst thing in the world, to be sure. just the worst pj album.

[Hypnos]

Its their worst album for sure but I still see the album as the famous "logical extension" of BS, has the same pop radio friendly sensibilities but with a darker tone. They also share the same production values.

[Hypnos]

What a pos of a song, Future Days is. That and Let The Records Play shoudnt have been on the album. Leave it at ten.

[scrub12]

You knew LB was bad when even BOB said they didnt even really have leftover songs that were recorded. That’s the bare minimum.

[Blenheim Augustine]

You knew LB was bad when even BOB said they didnt even really have leftover songs that were recorded. That’s the bare minimum.

Given Sleeping By Myself was on it they didn't even have a whole album's worth of songs. If they were going to recycle songs from other members I'd far prefer it was from Stone or Jeff's solo projects. I'd still like to hear PJ versions of: Bore Me, Unhand Me, Bayleaf, Anchors, Shame on You, Moonlander, Battle Cry. It's criminal how many good Stone songs havent made albums.

[joostone]

You knew LB was bad when even BOB said they didnt even really have leftover songs that were recorded. That’s the bare minimum.

Given Sleeping By Myself was on it they didn't even have a whole album's worth of songs. If they were going to recycle songs from other members I'd far prefer it was from Stone or Jeff's solo projects. I'd still like to hear PJ versions of: Bore Me, Unhand Me, Bayleaf, Anchors, Shame on You, Moonlander, Battle Cry. It's criminal how many good Stone songs havent made albums.

I would say the same about Jeff's latest two solo records. Each has atleast 1 or 2 tracks that could have been great for PJ and much much better than most on LB...

[stip]

people ripping on Lightning Bolt is like my RM Bat signal

[ABNorman]

I rate LB above Backspacer, Riot Act and sometimes S/T.

[stip]

Sometimes it amaze me how little credit you give the band over their output, both aesthetically and creatively. BS & LB are their pop phase, that became aparent in the design & concept. I mean, just look at the artwork, both consist in drawings and vectors. Light, superficial, immediate. They are fully aware. Now, with Gigaton its time to move on from that sound and aproach.

BS and LB have different motives. LB is not a pop approach. it's unfortunately a lazy approach - PJ by numbers. not the worst thing in the world, to be sure. just the worst pj album.

The PJ by the numbers critique does have some teeth in places. The closest comparison I can think of to Lightning Bolt is REM's collapse into now. It's an album with some great songs on it, but it also felt like ideas were repeating. Usually the repeats were variations on an existing theme, and most of them worked really well (and it produced one of my favorite REM songs of all time with It Happened Today), but they still felt familiar (in a way that was more pronounced with REM as there has always been more musical variety than with Pearl Jam, even if Eddie had more range as a singer than Michael Stipe). But at the same time the album is really mining an awful lot of different styles and while I've never checked this, I suspect it is song for song the album with the largest amount of actual lyrical content (and quite good lyrical content, with a few exceptions).

Take the song sequence that runs

My Father's Song - Sirens - Lightning Bolt - Infallible - Pendulum - Swallowed Whole - Let the Records Play - Sleeping By Myself - Yellow Moon

None of these songs are in the same style. I mean they are all rock songs in a guitar bass drum setup (as is basically all their work) but within those para maters each of these songs is markedly different from each other.



I have said it before and I'll keep saying it until this board is in the cold cold ground - the songwriting on Lightning Bolt is quite good. It is a sophisticated musical exploration of what it means to be middle aged and the legacy you leave behind. It is one of the most personal albums they wrote, and one of the most intimate and nakedly honest. It suffers from two key problems.

1, The production choices are all flat and loud - it strips the bite from some of the more aggressive songs like Mind Your Manners, takes away the intimacy needed on songs like Sirens and Future Days, the atmosphere (whether dark and claustrophobic in the case of pendulum, open and expansive like in Swallowed Whole), and loses the transitional dynamics needed in a song like Infallible.

2. I'm not a big live listener, but Lightning Bolt is maybe the only pearl jam record (Backspacer?) to not have a beloved touring cycle behind it. And that has nothing to do with the songs - it's not like people fall over themselves for the other performances on those tours. So every other album benefits from the added credibility, legitimacy, and aura that comes from years of favorite live performances by a band that, when they were on, was one of the greatest live acts of all time. That was a crucial element of the pearl jam experience, a way to discover/rediscover songs and cement them in your personal catalog of essential songs, that has been missing from those albums.

[stip]

Really the only place this is a logical backspacer follow up is that there are some pop aesthetic choices that make their way into Infallible and Let the Records Play that were probably inspired by Backspacer. Musically there are very few moments where you can point to a Lightning Bolt song and argue that it should have been on Backspacer, or that the songs sound similar Lighting Bolt/Unthought Known, maybe. And thematically they are VERY different albums. Backspacer very much provides the closing thoughts on the 9 album story you see playing through the Ten - Backspacer run. A case where each album is almost directly in conversation with the one before it. Lightning Bolt goes in completely new directions for the first time since Ten (in that it is not really reacting to what came right before). We'll see if, thematically, Gigaton continues from the ideas present in Lightning Bolt or if it is also the start of something new (or if Backspacer turns out to be less of a conclusion, and lightning bolt something of a thematic outlier)

[stip]

I'll quote Kevin Davis from the pearl jam praise thread (which I forget we had!)

With all the hubbub over Gigaton, I've been listening to Pearl Jam pretty regularly for the first time in a few years. In the past couple weeks I've played variable-sized portions of San Diego 11/7/95, Barcelona 11/21/96, Melbourne 3/5/98, Inglewood 7/14/98, Boston 8/30/00, Portland 7/20/06, the "Rarities Unreleased Cuts" promo, and an assortment of scattered tracks I have on my computer. I've said this before, but when I come back after an extended period of not being 24/7 neck-deep in this stuff, my critical inclinations just melt away when I listen to it -- it's just such a happy place for me.

San Diego 11/7/95 was one of those shows I had on silver-disc bootleg in the '90's (the bootleg was called "Monkeywrench" and had the Monkeywrench Radio guys yakking over all the song intros). I'd forgotten that this was the show where Eddie changed the lyrics to "Glorified G" to "glorified version of I hate this song" multiple times (and indeed it was the last performance of the song until 2003).

That's my point about the importance of having a great tour to support the experience of these songs. This doesn't matter a whole lot to me personally, since when I want to revisit Pearl Jam (and like KD and many of you I am having a great time coming back to music I haven't touched in a good long while) I use the studio albums and not the live songs, but the live versions are such an essential part of so many people's experience

[Coach]

Sometimes it amaze me how little credit you give the band over their output, both aesthetically and creatively. BS & LB are their pop phase, that became aparent in the design & concept. I mean, just look at the artwork, both consist in drawings and vectors. Light, superficial, immediate. They are fully aware. Now, with Gigaton its time to move on from that sound and aproach.

BS and LB have different motives. LB is not a pop approach. it's unfortunately a lazy approach - PJ by numbers. not the worst thing in the world, to be sure. just the worst pj album.

The PJ by the numbers critique does have some teeth in places. The closest comparison I can think of to Lightning Bolt is REM's collapse into now. It's an album with some great songs on it, but it also felt like ideas were repeating. Usually the repeats were variations on an existing theme, and most of them worked really well (and it produced one of my favorite REM songs of all time with It Happened Today), but they still felt familiar (in a way that was more pronounced with REM as there has always been more musical variety than with Pearl Jam, even if Eddie had more range as a singer than Michael Stipe). But at the same time the album is really mining an awful lot of different styles and while I've never checked this, I suspect it is song for song the album with the largest amount of actual lyrical content (and quite good lyrical content, with a few exceptions).

Take the song sequence that runs

My Father's Song - Sirens - Lightning Bolt - Infallible - Pendulum - Swallowed Whole - Let the Records Play - Sleeping By Myself - Yellow Moon

None of these songs are in the same style. I mean they are all rock songs in a guitar bass drum setup (as is basically all their work) but within those para maters each of these songs is markedly different from each other.



I have said it before and I'll keep saying it until this board is in the cold cold ground - the songwriting on Lightning Bolt is quite good. It is a sophisticated musical exploration of what it means to be middle aged and the legacy you leave behind. It is one of the most personal albums they wrote, and one of the most intimate and nakedly honest. It suffers from two key problems.

1, The production choices are all flat and loud - it strips the bite from some of the more aggressive songs like Mind Your Manners, takes away the intimacy needed on songs like Sirens and Future Days, the atmosphere (whether dark and claustrophobic in the case of pendulum, open and expansive like in Swallowed Whole), and loses the transitional dynamics needed in a song like Infallible.

2. I'm not a big live listener, but Lightning Bolt is maybe the only pearl jam record (Backspacer?) to not have a beloved touring cycle behind it. And that has nothing to do with the songs - it's not like people fall over themselves for the other performances on those tours. So every other album benefits from the added credibility, legitimacy, and aura that comes from years of favorite live performances by a band that, when they were on, was one of the greatest live acts of all time. That was a crucial element of the pearl jam experience, a way to discover/rediscover songs and cement them in your personal catalog of essential songs, that has been missing from those albums.

Love that tune and the PJ version of it, too.

[Strat]

Stip - not being a live listener you should maybe check out love versions of lightning bolt. Most fall completely flat live and are exposed for how bland the tracks generally are. Mind your manners and lightning bolt are the exception. They don’t play any others really

Look, I’m strat, I can still find tons of enjoyment listening to the bolt but it’s a formulaic Pearl Jam it because pearl jam doing their best to be pearl jam. It’s super off putting to me and that is why I rank it at the bottom.

[LetMeSleep]

Gigaton is already ahead of LBolt thanks to DotC. That song alone is better than all of LB and even if surrounded by SWBM x 10, Gigaton can't be bottom of the pile. Hooray.