Rat wrote:I've been around a lot of musicians in my life and I know that songs are hard to write, an album of new songs is even harder. PJ makes it look easy, but trust me people, they are not half finshed with this record. They only put out good material and that is a tough task. With that said, I have high expectations with the new album... I think it will be critically acclaimed, which hasn't happened since Vitalogy.
is that just a feeling or have you heard something most of us havent?
i think its going to be great when they get it done, but i always think that and am almost always happy for quite a while with the new music, the only exceptions are Binaural which i didnt like a lot of at first but with in a year or 2 it was up close to No Code and Yield, and Avocado which i loved at first like most then it went down hill quickly for me.
No, not based on anything I heard just an instinct. Unfortunately, I don't hang around those guys! hahaha
I agree with your statement, thats pretty much how I feel too, but this one is gonna carry a whole new gravity to it, I just have a serious hunch.
Rat wrote:I've been around a lot of musicians in my life and I know that songs are hard to write, an album of new songs is even harder. PJ makes it look easy, but trust me people, they are not half finshed with this record. They only put out good material and that is a tough task. With that said, I have high expectations with the new album... I think it will be critically acclaimed, which hasn't happened since Vitalogy.
is that just a feeling or have you heard something most of us havent?
i think its going to be great when they get it done, but i always think that and am almost always happy for quite a while with the new music, the only exceptions are Binaural which i didnt like a lot of at first but with in a year or 2 it was up close to No Code and Yield, and Avocado which i loved at first like most then it went down hill quickly for me.
No, not based on anything I heard just an instinct. Unfortunately, I don't hang around those guys! hahaha
I agree with your statement, thats pretty much how I feel too, but this one is gonna carry a whole new gravity to it, I just have a serious hunch.
Damn i wish it was gonna be out in a couple of weeks
Rat wrote:I've been around a lot of musicians in my life and I know that songs are hard to write, an album of new songs is even harder. PJ makes it look easy, but trust me people, they are not half finshed with this record. They only put out good material and that is a tough task. With that said, I have high expectations with the new album... I think it will be critically acclaimed, which hasn't happened since Vitalogy.
i would say every PJ album after Vitalogy was critically acclaimed (maybe not No Code) but specially Avocado and Backspacer.
Why not start with Yield then?
Critical acclaim where: charts, fan base, major mags?
Yeh I was referring to the music critics and radio, not the fan base. Yield is definitely liked oasisfan, I forgot to mention it. And yeh you are right vinylguy, avocado and backspacer were more liked by the critics than the fans maybe. Good call. The other three records, eh not so much.
No Code had rave reviews back in the day..the fan base hated it. Yield had a lot of good review and fans loved it.
Binaural..not so good reviews and fand didnt like it much..Riot Act had strong reviews and the fan base was happy with it..but i would say that Avocado and Backspacer had critical acclaim by critics.
i guess those two are weird in that way, the fan base kinda hate them and critics really praise them.
I also think they gain a lot of new fans because of those two records.
Rat wrote:I've been around a lot of musicians in my life and I know that songs are hard to write, an album of new songs is even harder. PJ makes it look easy, but trust me people, they are not half finshed with this record. They only put out good material and that is a tough task. With that said, I have high expectations with the new album... I think it will be critically acclaimed, which hasn't happened since Vitalogy.
i would say every PJ album after Vitalogy was critically acclaimed (maybe not No Code) but specially Avocado and Backspacer.
Why not start with Yield then?
Critical acclaim where: charts, fan base, major mags?
Yeh I was referring to the music critics and radio, not the fan base. Yield is definitely liked oasisfan, I forgot to mention it. And yeh you are right vinylguy, avocado and backspacer were more liked by the critics than the fans maybe. Good call. The other three records, eh not so much.
No Code had rave reviews back in the day..the fan base hated it. Yield had a lot of good review and fans loved it.
Binaural..not so good reviews and fand didnt like it much..Riot Act had strong reviews and the fan base was happy with it..but i would say that Avocado and Backspacer had critical acclaim by critics.
i guess those two are weird in that way, the fan base kinda hate them and critics really praise them.
I also think they gain a lot of new fans because of those two records.
no code had fairly mixed reviews. there was still a fair amount of hostility towards PJ in 1996 for basically not being nirvana. People liked that PJ was reaching, but were not always happy with the product. At least that was the general thrust of the reviews I had read at the time. I read every one I could find but that's also pre internet so my searching was hardly exhaustive. Likewise, reviews for Yield and Binaural were also pretty mixed.
I'm not even sure, from the ones I've read, if they've ever had an album that's had major critical acclaim. I think critics like a lot of their records, but I can't remember any of their albums being regarded as a classic (besides Ten, which probably has a lot of extenuating circumstances).
digster wrote:I'm not even sure, from the ones I've read, if they've ever had an album that's had major critical acclaim. I think critics like a lot of their records, but I can't remember any of their albums being regarded as a classic (besides Ten, which probably has a lot of extenuating circumstances).
There was a moment, i guess from yield to avocado, where mainstream rock magazines seemed pissed with them because they didnt do press.
Specially Rolling Stone.
Yeah, I think they've just always occupied this space of "yeah, they're good" with critics, never really being too hot or too cold. This is regardless of their commercial popularity throughout, I think.
Rat wrote:I've been around a lot of musicians in my life and I know that songs are hard to write, an album of new songs is even harder. PJ makes it look easy, but trust me people, they are not half finshed with this record. They only put out good material and that is a tough task. With that said, I have high expectations with the new album... I think it will be critically acclaimed, which hasn't happened since Vitalogy.
i would say every PJ album after Vitalogy was critically acclaimed (maybe not No Code) but specially Avocado and Backspacer.
Why not start with Yield then?
Critical acclaim where: charts, fan base, major mags?
Yeh I was referring to the music critics and radio, not the fan base. Yield is definitely liked oasisfan, I forgot to mention it. And yeh you are right vinylguy, avocado and backspacer were more liked by the critics than the fans maybe. Good call. The other three records, eh not so much.
No Code had rave reviews back in the day..the fan base hated it. Yield had a lot of good review and fans loved it.
Binaural..not so good reviews and fand didnt like it much..Riot Act had strong reviews and the fan base was happy with it..but i would say that Avocado and Backspacer had critical acclaim by critics.
i guess those two are weird in that way, the fan base kinda hate them and critics really praise them.
I also think they gain a lot of new fans because of those two records.
no code had fairly mixed reviews. there was still a fair amount of hostility towards PJ in 1996 for basically not being nirvana. People liked that PJ was reaching, but were not always happy with the product. At least that was the general thrust of the reviews I had read at the time. I read every one I could find but that's also pre internet so my searching was hardly exhaustive. Likewise, reviews for Yield and Binaural were also pretty mixed.
Stip is right about No Code. It had very mixed reviews at the time, with most critics considering it a misfire. Yield was generally favourable from the ton of reviews I read and was the first album where the critics started using “return to form”.... a sentiment that would be reused for every subsequent release by at least a large minority of reviewers.
Just to add to McParadigm list of metacritic ratings – Binaural has 69 on the site off 16 reviews. Which, if we agree Yield had mostly positive reviews, means that Binaural was the clear nadir from a purely critical reception perspective. Everything since then has been continued improvement – something I find interesting even if my personal opinion is the exact opposite. I wonder how much can be explained by reviewer’s starting to give them more of a pass because of the ‘Elder Statesman” card and viewing them through nostalgia glasses.
This has been brought up a few times, and I know stip, among others, disagrees with me on this point, but metacritic is not a good barometer of what critics actually think of an album, or to put it more precisely, if an album by the band is truly more or less critically acclaimed than another.
I wholeheartedly agree (and I know this is ground we raked over on the previous RM a number of times, so I'll try to restrain myself from yammering needlessly.)
Yeah don't get me started on Metacritic, I don't feel like writing a long-ass rant but it's completely absurd to think it means anything when the publications used from one album to another rarely are the same and they all have such different ratings systems (turning a 5 star review into a 100/100 rating = stupid)
Comparing the score of an album that came out in 2000, when there weren't as many publications to choose from as today, and as many albums to review, to Backspacer or Avocado, makes no sense. Specifically Binaural has only 16 reviews and its score is dramatically brought down by 2 publications that respectively give it a score of 1/5 and 30/100 (there's no score or rating of any sort on the actual review for the latter so I don't know where Metacritic got that from). One of these two publications is apparently a paper magazine that has very few reviews used on Metacritic and nothing after 2001, and you can't help to wonder if they even listened to the album in full when you read stuff like 'A stinker of an album... a giant leap backwards in combining the overblown punk of 'Vs' with the grunge bluster of 'Ten', minus the tunes'. Really? (mind you, the other publication reviewed Binaural as being 'stadium rock').
Remove that 1/5 review and Binaural gets a 72 rating overall.
So yeah, I know, of course if you remove negative reviews and only keep the positive and mixed ones all albums end up with a positive rating, something around the 70 mark. But guess what? For the most part this is what's happening today in the music press. Very negative reviews are quite rare, there's too much music to choose from and a lot of publications won't bother with bands they don't like. And when you do find a bad review (see: Pitchfork on Backspacer) the positive outweighs it simply because there are much more publications to begin with. As a result most stuff usually ends up with a decent rating. Just look at how many pages you have to go through, for a given year, to find stuff with a below 70 rating.
Anyway, this is not even a defense of Binaural, just an illustration of the flaws of the Metacritic system and why it doesn't tell anything of value (and even that would be a best case scenario if you assume that scores and ratings mean anything to begin with, which I don't).
So much for not ranting I guess.
cutuphalfdead wrote:so glad i don't see signatures
Does anyone really care what a 20-something "blogger / writer / journalist / occasional travel photographer" thinks of Pearl Jam?
While a Western guitar motif lost on the swings drum bass fusion, get your own thoughts into the subconscious often forgotten. "Pendulum" is a sweeping soul from the ballast.
darth_vedder wrote:Didn't Rolling Stone say 'Pearl Jam' was their best album in a decade? I always thought that was just plain silly.
If they meant best album of the decade, assuming that the decade ran from 2001 - 2010 not 2000 to 2009, then they may have had a point.
While a Western guitar motif lost on the swings drum bass fusion, get your own thoughts into the subconscious often forgotten. "Pendulum" is a sweeping soul from the ballast.
I know for a fact that reviews are often rigged, even from big name rags. That said, I dont really know what a good barometer for critical acclaim is any more. Its probably best to just wait a few years and let history decide.
darth_vedder wrote:Didn't Rolling Stone say 'Pearl Jam' was their best album in a decade? I always thought that was just plain silly.
They did, I'm pretty sure...PJ is in that part of their career now where everything is a 'return to form', at least in how it's marketed and presented. I remember even reading that kind of thing with Riot Act, which is pretty far from PJ's original 'form', whatever it is. PJ is a very interesting band when it comes to critics, because you can often realize very easily how much they did not listen to the record they're reviewing, or digest it in any meaningful fashion.
Also, I think a lot of critics don't view PJ's catalog in the same way we do. Specifically, I think that a lot of critics feel that the only great album they made was their first, so they always want them to go back to that. That feeling, along with the political slant of the record, was really how S/T was marketed. It was the first time the band was also saying it was kind of a return to how it used to be.
