Backspacer: Official Album Thread

[Jorge]

Yeah, I think the idea that if there's 1 track out of 13 I dislike I'm not gonna listen to the album is pretty fucking silly.

[Self]

On occasion, I've been known to skip songs which I like.

[Heathen]

Yeah, I think the idea that if there's 1 track out of 13 I dislike I'm not gonna listen to the album is pretty fucking silly.

You just have low standards.

[stip]

Yeah, I think the idea that if there's 1 track out of 13 I dislike I'm not gonna listen to the album is pretty fucking silly.

if there is one part of one track of 13 I won't listen.

[hlniv]

The last time I listened through Backspacer (maybe 6 months ago) - I convinced myself that I was correct in my low opinion of it.

GSMF -> Got Some = not a bad 1-2. Certainly meets latter-day PJ expectations and I enjoy both

Fixer -> Johnny Guitar -> Just Breathe = where the album falls apart. These three define the album for me. PJ trying to be happy and poppy and popular. The problem is they aren't very good at that. If I want to listen to this type of music, there are many better places to go. Uggh

Amongst the Waves -> Unthought Known = Songs with so much potential that both end up falling flat on their faces. Both are stunted, hollow cores of what PJ used to be. This is where I confirm that this album will always be at or near the bottom of my opinion of Pearl Jam

Supersonic -> Speed of Sound = uggggh. Supersonic is more of the vein of Fixer/JG/JB, but somehow even less effective. The over the top nature of how ineffective it actually is sometimes gives me a little bit of enjoyment, but for unsustainable reasons. Speed of Sound just makes me want to go listen to the demo. It's like teasing me with what should be a good song, but isn't.

Force of Nature -> The End = Two very enjoyable tunes in the right circumstances. Despite the final production, Force of Nature is the song on the album that has held up the best. And The End is one of my favorite Ed solo performances, too bad it's somehow required to fill out a poor PJ album.


Backspacer is essentially a 4 song EP for me, and it's a really good EP -> GSMF, Got Some, Force of Nature, The End. Throw in Speed of Sound demo after Got Some, and there's 5 songs that are good.

But even a good 5 song EP will almost always exist towards the bottom of any full album comparisons for me.

[digster]

There's really only two songs I tend to come back to from this record; Johnny Guitar and The End (and, on a blue moon, Got Some). It's not that those songs are perfect, but they've got some really inspiring, cool things going on in them. The rest of the record is a collection of poorly-written stuff that doesn't seem to be produced very well and exists either in a style that PJ is particularly strong in, or just sounds like paint-by-numbers Pearl Jam. It's still at the bottom of their list of albums without much competition.

[bodysnatcher]

you can't expect too much from an album named after a turtle

[hlniv]

[ABNorman]

The Fixer music video should've been the band's heads on CGI turtles playing instruments.

[stip]

well I think we can all agree to that

[harmless]

Just breathe kinda sucks, amongst the waves kinda sucks, supersonic kinda sucks, unthought known kinda sucks. Force of nature I haven't decided upon yet, still. Unthought known seems to be significantly better when live and they jam it out.

4 songs that kinda suck shouldn't mean you just revile the album though (although maybe you don't)

I think an album having even one song I really don't care for is something of a deal-breaker for me; if it isn't a cohesive and enjoyable listening experience all the way through, it's very rarely going to be something I feel like returning to. Pearl Jam haven't managed that since Yield for me.

Red Dot is horrible though.

[harmless]

As I am too unpatient to wait for the "Major Flaw Backspacer Thread" I am going to post it here:

I recently had this thought that Backspacer could have been a cooler album if they had fully pursued the idea of making a fun record. They did it partly by including songs like Johnny Guitar, Fixer and Supersonic and by writing rather short songs. But these songs are surrounded by more classic Pearl Jam songs that are of mediocre quality (Force of Nature, Amongst the Waves, Got Some). A short album full of Johnny Guitars and Fixers would have been cool. Well, definitely more Johnny Guitars than Fixers, but you know what I mean.

I agree. If they wanted "fun" it was watered down by seriousness.

[stip]

I've said this before bit I think backspacer is meant to feel more free then fun, but with a sense of fragility about it. It might fail at that (though I don't think so) but I think fun mischaracterizes the album a bit

[Birds in Hell]

Just breathe kinda sucks, amongst the waves kinda sucks, supersonic kinda sucks, unthought known kinda sucks. Force of nature I haven't decided upon yet, still. Unthought known seems to be significantly better when live and they jam it out.

4 songs that kinda suck shouldn't mean you just revile the album though (although maybe you don't)

I think an album having even one song I really don't care for is something of a deal-breaker for me; if it isn't a cohesive and enjoyable listening experience all the way through, it's very rarely going to be something I feel like returning to. Pearl Jam haven't managed that since Yield for me.

Red Dot is horrible though.

Red Dot is a cute little curio, it does nothing to disrupt my enjoyment of the record. I don't much care for Low Light but I find it tolerable in context of the album, it's not "train-hurtling-off-the-tracks" bad like the least-enjoyable moments on the last few Pearl Jam albums (or the uneven pacing of Binaural and Riot Act).

[mastaflatch]

Just breathe kinda sucks, amongst the waves kinda sucks, supersonic kinda sucks, unthought known kinda sucks. Force of nature I haven't decided upon yet, still. Unthought known seems to be significantly better when live and they jam it out.

4 songs that kinda suck shouldn't mean you just revile the album though (although maybe you don't)

I think an album having even one song I really don't care for is something of a deal-breaker for me; if it isn't a cohesive and enjoyable listening experience all the way through, it's very rarely going to be something I feel like returning to. Pearl Jam haven't managed that since Yield for me.

Red Dot is horrible though.

Red Dot is a cute little curio, it does nothing to disrupt my enjoyment of the record. I don't much care for Low Light but I find it tolerable in context of the album, it's not "train-hurtling-off-the-tracks" bad like the least-enjoyable moments on the last few Pearl Jam albums (or the uneven pacing of Binaural and Riot Act).

it was also a welcomed sign of a band still putting little experiments on records for the sake of it. i'd take an album littered with little moments like this over pseudo grand gestures à la Sirens any day.

[digster]

I do think PJ intended this to be their 'fun' (albeit not necessarily care-free) record, although that's overly simplistic, and it doesn't really hold up on close scrutiny. Some of PJ's darkest, more hopeless stuff is on here (Speed of Sound and The End). It's just a weird amalgamation of odds and ends that don't really add up to coherence.

[digster]

This is probably the wrong thread for this, but is anyone's enjoyment of Yield actually hindered by Red Dot? It just seems so slight (purposefully so) that it's hard to imagine anyone actually docking points because of it. I'm not really talking about people not liking it, more than it actually hurting the album in their view.

[ABNorman]

This is probably the wrong thread for this, but is anyone's enjoyment of Yield actually hindered by Red Dot? It just seems so slight (purposefully so) that it's hard to imagine anyone actually docking points because of it. I'm not really talking about people not liking it, more than it actually hurting the album in their view.

For me it's the one-two punch of Red Dot and MFC which means the album has to kind of boot up again in the back half.

[ABNorman]

I haven't listened to Backspacer for ages.

[stip]

This is probably the wrong thread for this, but is anyone's enjoyment of Yield actually hindered by Red Dot? It just seems so slight (purposefully so) that it's hard to imagine anyone actually docking points because of it. I'm not really talking about people not liking it, more than it actually hurting the album in their view.

Yeah, it does. I hate the track to begin with and it's like a brick wall after DTE and signals the start of the really uneven pacing in the back half