Lets Actually Listen to the Album: Lightning Bolt

[BurtReynolds]

Sirens is Mother. why doesn't anyone see that?!??!

[warehouse]

Sirens is Mother. why doesn't anyone see that?!??!

probably b/c mother isnt covered with sappy vocal hooks

[Thejambi]

Sirens is Mother. why doesn't anyone see that?!??!

[McParadigm]

Hee-yuhhr your moth-uhhr.
Like a si-ruhn in the-uh ni(wigglejaw)iught.
Where-uh's your fahth-uhhr.
He wuhrks Thursdays untilllll nine.

Let me catch my breath to breathe
before I go back in.
I'm due to ride her
after your uncle Ted.

If you're still up after I'm done
then we can split a beer.
Oh
When I bang your mom,
I hold her close
knowing that
someday she'll get fatter.

etc.

[Thejambi]

[Mine]

I've AL to this after a while and well...

Gateway is a bit of a mess for me and I'm almost uncomfortable expressing my opinion about the verses and the bass melody that heavily influenced them. I don't hate it but i don't find it particularly remarkable either. The verses don't work for me but i do like the rest of the song. It has a sort of a nursery rhyme quality to it that i think doesn't fit the song at all. I find it to be a bad fit for the lyrics unlike the rest of the song.

Mind Your Manners isn't terrible actually. I wouldn't mind if Ed never does the kind of delivery he does on the verses here. I caught myself believing That I needed God what he says here i sensed in Gateway. In Gateway there's a sense of him being insecure about "his way" which result in frustration. Back to Mind You Manners i like the bridge. Overall while not bad is hardly remarkable either. lyrically a Gateway spin-off. Would have benefited from sounding less polite.

My Father's Son is a bit of a mixed bag. I like certain "sections" but i don't think they flow well together. The structure is rough around the edges and the arrangement has some serious issues, the 2 basses are random more than they are interesting, would probably sound better if one was a guitar.

Sirens is essentially a pop song pretending to be a serious rock ballad. Overall the safest song on an already safe record.

Lightning Bolt is the 1st song on this record that isn't trying to prove me how deep and serious Pearl Jam is and this alone is something to be appreciative of. Some of the other tracks on this record seem to be trying to convince you they're intellectually challenging but they turn out to be obtuse instead. This one does the opposite, at least in my opinion. I don't think this one was written with the live shows in mind, at least it shouldn't have been. This should have been a huge studio epic number. Not with this band and producer obviously but is partially there. This one needed real big dynamics, some parts should have been huge both in loudness and the size of the soundstage while others quiet like the 1st verse, which is fine as it is in the sense that its apparent banality is essential to the build of the song that, again, could have been spectacular in the right hands. I don't care for the various toys BOB tries out in the song at various points - I wish Ed was still difficult to work with. The lyrics are abstract. At certain point bizarre and erratic. And your death will soon arrive As she finally decides that all her Problems, they won't die with you Yes, Mr.Vedder, we are all going to die but would you please stop reminding us all the fucking time. About the chorus, after random vowel sounds I'm still Alive, Yeah I random vowel sounds I'm Still Alive, everything seems acceptable. Seriously though, uninteresting choruses and better developed verses is something that could be argued is common in the vast majority of popular music.

ps. You gotta know you'll never let her go, she's a...whole world,... world over she's a worldwide suicide

Infallible drags for too long. Has some random things going on in the arrangement that i guess are supposed to be interesting and there are those creepy rapey background vocals that pop up at some point with those a-a-ahs. Ed sounds like he's annoyed with it, Freudian lapsus - That keep on slapping Right through our hands, being an indication of that. I hate how thin and plastic the vocals sound and i think is the one with the most bizarre pronunciation issues that elevates the ridiculous factor.

Pendulum is boring. This is one of the many "dark and moody" slow songs that exist and some last longer than 3 times the length of Pendulum and yet aren't as boring. It shouldn't have been just longer it should have been better in the 1st place. It's one of the instant gratification songs on LB, the problem with this being that the gratification lasts only that instant. There's not enough there to keep you interest after you've heard it a handful of times. It's not bad as it is uninteresting.

Swallowed Whole is a decent song. Not a fan of how the vocals sound especially the repeated monosyllables at the end of the verses. Hate the bass. It isn't just fat it's morbidly obese and it ruins the balance of the song. It's a huge mess in the lower frequencies that wants to steal the attention from what is otherwise a good song. This song needed a completely different sounding bass, possibly a different bass guitar do begin with. I

Let The Records Play isn't good. It doesn't bother me mainly because of how silly it is. I think enough Shania jokes were made about this one so i'll skip that. Mike said, about this one, that they used to make fun of the blues, well i think the blues is having the last laugh here. It's probably the only song on the album that i think they realise isn't good at all or at least they don't seem to be approaching it seriously.

Sleeping By Myself turned out ok. I'm glad it's here. It has kind of a refreshing effect. Put very simply sounds better than most of the album.

Yellow Moon.... my mind keeps tricking me into expecting this one to turn into Red Mosquito starting at the very beginning where i expect Ed do sing "he's a-waiting... oh" instead of "Here, far away". The structures are very similar, both end in the same way by repeating the same line 4 times - not that it means much admittedly. I think Stone said they raised the key of this one compared to earlier versions. I think they shouldn't have. Now that i think about it the key may be another reason why it reminds me of RM.
Future Days. And we have BOB save the best for last here. With this i mean :

Spoiler: show

Future Days is much better than i remembered it. I seem to remember Ed said he wasn't fully comfortable with recording a lullaby when he wrote Around The Band i think Future Days is him being fully comfortable with it. It should have been mixed softer, it should have been sounding very relaxed with some light reverb on the vocals and should have ended with a violin playing a variation of the vocal melody ending in a slow fade. I think BOB uses some kind of a reverse delay on the keys - an example of something in theory interesting but in practice completely worthless. I don't like the bridge - it's the most saccharin part of the song but even this could have been solved in the mixing stage. It shouldn't have gone power ballad there.

I don't like how the drums were mixed throughout the album. There was too much space given to the bass that is overbearing often and "eats" the bottom of the drums. This is something that bothers me a lot. The drumming to me sounds exaggeratedly unobtrusive. It's a weird coincidence that this is also how the drums were mixed. I really think favouring the bass that much over the drums was a huge mistake. The kick sounds like if it was made of cardboard. The vocals don't sound particularly good either. To much was eq-ed out which renders the vocals lifeless. The guitars are "blurry" and "muddy" most of the time. Some songs would sound better if the guitars were more "abrasive". The mix sounds as if whoever was doing it wasn't actually listening but merely looking at the waveforms and spectrum analysers etc. I mean It seems like the isolated tracks were compressed and eq-ed without considering how they actually end up sounding in the mix but how the graphs look like. On the other hand i wonder if certain "fattening" choices were made to give the impression that the songs are fuller because the arrangements are hardly brilliant. It's actually hard to find something interesting to say about a lot of the songs here. Ed covers a decent variety of styles vocally and does it very well i just wish the songs he's singing were better and the vocals sounded more natural.
One thing that i found interesting is how different this record sounds to Ed's Better Days. The latter sounds much less polished, very obvious in the vocals. You'd expect that a Julia Roberts led movie would demand a more polished product than Pearl Jam.

[Vindicator]

Damn Mine, nice writeup, but I disagree with you so much. I love the album, pretty much all the way through.

[WaitingForBluey]

Pearl Jam has never written a song called Gateway. Just so you know.

[WaitingForBluey]

Damn Mine, nice writeup, but I disagree with you so much. I love the album, pretty much all the way through.

I concur

[warehouse]

mike mccready said they used to make fun of the blues? when the hell was that?

[Mine]

Pearl Jam has never written a song called Gateway. Just so you know.

[McParadigm]

I've actually laughed to this, too.

[McParadigm]

ps. You gotta know you'll never let her go, she's a...whole world,... world over she's a worldwide suicide

On that note, the pre-chorus in Getaway is almost exactly the "It's a shame to awake in a world of pain" riff, isn't it?

I really hate, by the way, when Ed writes songs about writing songs. I don't think he has enough of interest to say in that direction. But if a track like Lightning Bolt was addressing the band's new per diem of 'one cornbally playful song about music per release,' rather than serving as a central moment of the album, I'd probably enjoy it more than I do. As "the new record's Supersonic," it's an improvement. As "the title track / midpoint / epic of the album," it's poopshit.

[Mine]

mike mccready said they used to make fun of the blues? when the hell was that?

It was Matt it seems Mike agreed though, it's in the Judd Apatow interview. It's been a while since i saw that i mixed them up

around the 29 minute mark.

[bodysnatcher]

Look at that magnetism

[McParadigm]

Those questions were real hard bro

[Mine]

ps. You gotta know you'll never let her go, she's a...whole world,... world over she's a worldwide suicide

On that note, the pre-chorus in Getaway is almost exactly the "It's a shame to awake in a world of pain" riff, isn't it?

I really hate, by the way, when Ed writes songs about writing songs. I don't think he has enough of interest to say in that direction. But if a track like Lightning Bolt was addressing the band's new per diem of 'one cornbally playful song about music per release,' rather than serving as a central moment of the album, I'd probably enjoy it more than I do. As "the new record's Supersonic," it's an improvement. As "the title track / midpoint / epic of the album," it's poopshit.

The lyrics are abstract enough to make irrelevant what they are about, i know he stated what they are about but it's trivia more than something the lyrics insist on. Most reviews interpret it as "about a woman".
My problem with it is that it's neither or both depends on how you look at it. So in practice i agree with you. In my opinion it's written as an epic but the way they arranged it pushed it towards the 'one cornbally playful song about music per release'/"the new record's Supersonic," classification. This is where i think PJ as a band are worse than Ed alone. I would use Hard Sun as an example. Horrible song, really horrible but i think Ed managed to give it some appeal with the arrangement and giving any appeal to that is nearly impossible without re-writing it. Pearl Jam as a band seems to be very much in line with Brendan O'Brien where the part (preferably the one he's playing) is what matters and how the song ends up sounding in the end is of lesser importance or will get fixed in pro tools anyway.

[stip]

I've taken Lightning Bolt to be a song about inspiration much more than song writing in particular.

[Mine]

Look at that magnetism

well it seems they aren't polar opposites

[Mine]

Those questions were real hard bro

sorry but that's a WTF expression