evenslow wrote:so what have we learned from this journey through the archives?
1. recency bias is a helluva drug.
2. everyone is full of shit.
3. i am being unfair.
4. we've been here far too long.
5. it's fun to get a new pearl jam record!
6. what's the truest reaction to a new album - the first bright-eyed, open-hearted look or a few months later when some would pull a near 180 and cynically trash what they had only months ago exalted???
important lessons for us all, folks. see you in 11 years when i do this for the gigaton thread. the internet is watching.
Likewise, I'd be curious to know if there's ever been a PJ album whose response has followed this trajectory, i.e. tongue-wagging enthusiasm turning to outright hatred within the course of...a year? Two years? Understanding that this perception is limited by the communities, friend circles, etc. I've been a part of, the albums from
No Code through
Riot Act mostly seemed to elicit fairly lukewarm knee-jerk reactions (with the possible exception of
Yield, which was a little warmer, but still colored by many fans' lingering hopes for
Ten Pt. 2) followed by varying degrees of growing appreciation.
Lightning Bolt felt relatively unloved from the start and seems to remain so. I was pretty detached from PJ world when S/T came out, so I don't remember much about the fan reaction to that, though I remember the "return to form" machine running full steam ahead in the press.
My initial reaction to
Backspacer was very much like the ones you quoted -- gushing praise, at one point thinking it was their 3rd or 4th best album, this despite the fact that there were a few songs that I always kind of felt like I was forcing myself to like (S/T had a few of these too), and no songs (other than "The Fixer") that I singularly enjoyed as much as songs from previous records. In reality, I think I just found it extremely difficult to think critically and honestly about PJ in any way from 1995-2010 or so (2010 was the year I joined RM; the jury is out on the correlation between these two things).
I still think
Backspacer is a pretty decent album; there are a good 5-6 songs on it I really enjoy, and the few that really sink the album only do so (for me) because they come all in a row, right at the point in the sequence when the record needs to do something to keep your attention. For as little as the
Backspacer songs were developed live, I found many of even its weaker songs more enjoyable in that context -- sandwiched between other songs that were built to do heavy lifting, they could kind of breeze by in a way that highlighted their minor virtues, rather than saddling them all with the impossible task of collective self-sustenance. The lack of BO'B production on the live versions didn't hurt either.
