What is Each Album's Major Flaw?: Vs.

[Soulfire]

I'd say that the major flaw actually turned into a strength for this album. I'm quoted in some book about rock music from back in the day griping that Vs. didn't sound like a follow up album to Ten.

I fell in love with Ten. I was one of the many eager people snapping up Vs. the day it was available. As I listened to it the first time Go facestomped me and left me with my jaw open. Animal tore things up, but the songs sounded different than Ten in a lot of ways. There was a difference in tone, movement within the songs, clarity, complexity, etc. There was simply a lot of difference. As songs like Dissident and Glorified G played even the first time, I knew things had changed in a pretty major way and I think I was honestly a bit bitter about that. However, there was also a part of me loving this change that I heard on songs like Go and Indifference.

I think I felt like there needed to be one more album's worth of transition between Ten and Vs. to sit right with me at the time. Now, I think Ten and Vs. are likely my two favorite PJ albums, but they still seem pretty far apart musically to me. I think I was probably also too harsh of a judge when Vs. first came out. There was a lot less "flow" on Vs. from one song to the next than on Ten. This made it feel more fragmented and varied and it took me time to adjust to that. Also, I think Vs. had the first Pearl Jam songs on an album that I knew I simply didn't like and that too was a bit of a bitter pill to swallow at the time when Pearl Jam first felt like "my band" and I wanted to hold them to a standard of flawlessness (and was willing to just say that Deep was my least favorite on Ten, but that I didn't really dislike it).

[harmless]

There's nothing wrong with Vs. There isn't a single bad song it. The only problem might be that its worst songs can't possibly hope to match its best songs, and that's hardly a failing.

[holdtightthething]

Dissident is not so good, otherwise a perfect album.