Haven't gone through this thread in detail but thought I'd post since I listened to LB again after a bit of a break. Hasn't grown old for me at all. Some songs I like slightly more, some slightly less. Overall, still my 4th favourite PJ album.
Tracks I love: Infallible, Getaway, Pendulum, Sirens, Yellow Moon
Tracks I like a lot: MYM, MFS
Tracks I like: SBM, LB, SW, LTRP
Tracks I tolerate: FD
Sirens has risen up in my personal rankings while SW and MFS have fallen down slightly. FD I can tolerate now while I could barely care enough to listen to it initially. My feeling about every other song is almost the same as when the album came out. Infallible is still the crowning achievement of LB for me, followed by Getaway. Two songs I'd put up against some of my all-time favourite PJ tunes.
Err, thanks. I never really went away, just lurking most of the time. You can bet my presence will be more apparent as soon as there's rumours of a leak or some new album news.
Just too busy with family these days to really participate in these engaging discussions. I do enjoy them though.
Infallible is the clearest articulation of the idea that ran through Getaway and Mind Your Manners—namely that we do have the ability to challenge and confront a world falling apart, provided we embrace our own capacity for imagination—to allow ourselves to be inspired, to dream big, and to understand that the primary obstacle in our ways is ourselves. In many ways this is one of Pearl Jam’s oldest themes—the transformational power of people, but there’s a (not surprising) older gloss to the presentation. In the past there was almost an aesthetic sensibility to the message. The world needed to be transformed because the current arrangement was offensive. And there was an intense desire to have something to belong to—the pressing need for a world that didn’t alienate you. But that’s different on Lightning Bolt. Art composed by middle aged, wildly successful people with families will feel different. It will be about preserving what they’ve built, the stake they have, and the legacy they’ll be leaving for the people who will survive them. There will be a more explicitly optimistic tone (it only makes sense to read your own personal journey back onto the world—if I can create something lasting out of nothing we all can do it), and anxiety about failure. Before I had nothing to lose. When your music is about your own alienation you’ve already experienced the worst and you’re striving for something better. But once you have everything to lose the stakes become more tangible.
The music reflects that fear. The Lightning Bolt transition into Infallible cuts off what was going to be a soaring, transformative, emancipatory guitar solo and, rising from beneath, we get a martial, pounding, urgent (though not quite strident—the song isn’t going for that tone since it’s trying to persuade, rather than hector) warning. The music creeps up on us, almost stalking, calling to mind My Father’s Son and Lightning Bolt (and anticipating Pendulum)—songs about the fears we can never quite escape and ideas we cannot fully grasp. These can tear us apart if we let them, and the music in Infallible does sound like something falling apart that we scramble to put back together with nothing more than optimism and will (which the song believes is enough). The bridge is thoughtful and hopeful while resisting the urge to be overly showy. Instead of a full blown guitar solo we are instead asked to focus instead on the understated background vocals that remind us there’s a small role for everyone to play. And the song’s emotional climax runs headlong into a discordant wall, reminding us that there’s still much to do, and time is running out. It’s one of their more interesting musical compositions in a long time. The closest analogue in the catalog is probably Rival. It’s a musical vein I hope they continue to mine.
Eddie’s performance matches the song. The verses are an interesting juxtaposition of loud and quiet—Eddie shouting out a whisper, introducing a truth we may not want to hear, but not wanting to bludgeon us over the head with it. He takes steps to ensure we don’t run away like you would approaching an easily startled animal. And the juxtaposition with the go for broke chorus is effective, drawing the listener in and ensuring he has our attention before hammering the message home with the kind of larger than life commitment we rarely see anymore—though it is coming through the weathered pipes of an old campaigner rather than the youthful firebrand first picking up their sword and imagining that a better world comes from shouting loud enough.
It’s not that this sentiment is wrong. It’s just that Infallible understands we have to change something in ourselves—our own limited vision--before we’ll be receptive to that message. This is an old theme in pearl jam’s music, but one that they’ve continued to refine throughout the years. The title of the song is instructive. To be infallible is to have faith in the absolute truth of what you believe. Faith is the right word, because the assumption of infallibility cuts off dialogue, appeals to evidence, any possibility that you may be wrong. It shields you from calling your beliefs into question, answerable to nothing but your own conviction. And our current problem is our own sense of infallibility. Eddie keeps this vague, and you can read your own causes and concerns into it. Maybe it’s an attack on religion (which is an obvious target given the high correlation between religious faith and infallible certainty), but as I’ve argued throughout I think that’s far too narrow a read. In concert this song was sarcastically dedicated to Wall Street and other targets Eddie would identify as an enemy of change. You can easily attach your cause de jour and it’ll probably work.
But it’s really resistance to change that the song (as well as Getaway and Mind Your Manners before it) is grappling with. We just have the most explicit presentation in Infallible (though I think Mind Your Manners offers the most interesting and nuanced pass at this). We face a world in crisis whose magnitude is amplified (in Eddie’s eyes) by this new emphasis on legacy that comes from having children. It’s not that we’re ruining things for ourselves; it’s not the visceral aesthetic reaction to George Bush. It’s the price the next generation will pay for our actions. The opening lyrics reflect this.
Keep on locking your doors
Keep on building your floors
Keep on just as before
Pay disasters no mind
Didn't get you this time
No prints left at the crime
Our ships come in
And its sinking
The head in the sand accusation, the refusal to confront the long term costs of our actions (it didn’t impact me, I’m not directly responsible, therefore I don’t have to do anything about it). We get a call back to the opening lyrics in Getaway about ships sinking --a not quite apocalyptic vision that reflects the desire of the song to ease the listener in to the message, and one that also reflects the time horizons of the problem. Our ship has come in, we think we’ve made it, but we’re ignoring the fact that it simply isn’t sustainable.
And we get our first presentation of the chorus—optimistic, transformative, confident that there’s no problem we can’t fix if we can just focus our attention, imagination, and will towards it. We’re just too distracted, too afraid, too shackled by a deeply engrained sense of learned helplessness to do anything about it. Eddie’s phrasing is simple, declarative, and powerful—the presentation of an obvious truth that we’ve forgotten
Of everything that's possible
In the hearts and minds of men
Somehow it is the biggest things
That keep on slipping
Right through our hands
We have the first mention of the infallible lyric, and in this context the target is less an institution (religion, finance, government) and more ourselves. The infallible truth we need to challenge is one of two things: The belief that everything is fine, the status quo is sustainable, we can go on just as before without any consequences or (and these are not mutually exclusive) our own conviction that we’re so flawed and imperfect that there’s nothing we can do about it except watch it come crashing down on top of us. Lock your doors and hope for the best.
It’s a shame that we didn’t feel the necessary urgency or muster up the will to act until things got this bad. Maybe we needed the threat of an ending to compel us to try and make things better. But we can do better, we just better do it quickly. “Time we best begin, here at the ending”
The second verse makes the religious connection back to Getaway and Mind Your Manners, but also makes it clear that this isn’t really a song that’s attacking organized religion. It’s attacking the passivity that it can engender—the faith that someone else will solve the problems for us.
Put your faith in big hands
Pay no more than a glance
And that’s as much a political lesson as it is a spiritual one, learned the hard way during the Obama years—a response to the naïve faith of 2008 which believed that if you just elect a nice guy who promised hope and change and to not be George Bush that somehow the world would magically transform itself. The lesson learned was that the only way to make the world better is to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself (which is given a nice musical mirror in the bridge where we have a low, workman like background chant that invites you to add your voice in a small but meaningful way, rather than a larger than life expansive gesture). The verse continues, challenging the passivity that tells us that there’s nothing we can do to make things better, this is as good as it gets. And we may hear this from our leaders (it’s easy to imagine Eddie thinking of coal and oil lobbies opposing renewable energy as he writes this) but it’s directed just as much at us. The people who empower them by believing what they say.
The chorus repeats the same sentiment—as long as we trust in ourselves and our own capacity (think the end of Faithful but about society rather than relationships) we can leave behind something better. But that window is fast closing, and doing nothing is so tempting. It’s not for nothing that the song fades out with a warning….
Keep on locking your doors
Keep on building your floors
Keep on just as before
As far as guitar playing/writing - this song isn't the least bit interesting. It prods, it drags, its dull as fuck and the live performances really show that.
however, this is where BOB actually did a great job (in my opinion) because the studio cut brings the song to live. It hides the simplicity of the guitar parts under the bells and whistles of the usual BOB approach and it actually brings the entire song together. Infallible is one of my favorite songs of the past few records from pearl jam and i think the studio cut is fantastic with great vocals from Eddie.
Strat wrote:As far as guitar playing/writing - this song isn't the least bit interesting. It prods, it drags, its dull as fuck and the live performances really show that.
however, this is where BOB actually did a great job (in my opinion) because the studio cut brings the song to live. It hides the simplicity of the guitar parts under the bells and whistles of the usual BOB approach and it actually brings the entire song together. Infallible is one of my favorite songs of the past few records from pearl jam and i think the studio cut is fantastic with great vocals from Eddie.
live, its a skipper.
Crazy.
Great call on this. I remember hearing the promo snippet (in the "Watch Stone draw with charcoal" video) and thinking how great it sounded. But it really is a plodder on the stage.
Its a great backdrop for eddie to spread his vocal wings and carry a melody but unfortunately he just can't do it live.
Strat wrote:As far as guitar playing/writing - this song isn't the least bit interesting. It prods, it drags, its dull as fuck and the live performances really show that.
however, this is where BOB actually did a great job (in my opinion) because the studio cut brings the song to live. It hides the simplicity of the guitar parts under the bells and whistles of the usual BOB approach and it actually brings the entire song together. Infallible is one of my favorite songs of the past few records from pearl jam and i think the studio cut is fantastic with great vocals from Eddie.
live, its a skipper.
Crazy.
Great call on this. I remember hearing the promo snippet (in the "Watch Stone draw with charcoal" video) and thinking how great it sounded. But it really is a plodder on the stage.
Its a great backdrop for eddie to spread his vocal wings and carry a melody but unfortunately he just can't do it live.
So does this mean you really don't like a lot of the newish material?
Strat wrote:As far as guitar playing/writing - this song isn't the least bit interesting. It prods, it drags, its dull as fuck and the live performances really show that.
however, this is where BOB actually did a great job (in my opinion) because the studio cut brings the song to live. It hides the simplicity of the guitar parts under the bells and whistles of the usual BOB approach and it actually brings the entire song together. Infallible is one of my favorite songs of the past few records from pearl jam and i think the studio cut is fantastic with great vocals from Eddie.
live, its a skipper.
Crazy.
Great call on this. I remember hearing the promo snippet (in the "Watch Stone draw with charcoal" video) and thinking how great it sounded. But it really is a plodder on the stage.
Its a great backdrop for eddie to spread his vocal wings and carry a melody but unfortunately he just can't do it live.
So does this mean you really don't like a lot of the newish material?
Strat wrote:As far as guitar playing/writing - this song isn't the least bit interesting. It prods, it drags, its dull as fuck and the live performances really show that.
however, this is where BOB actually did a great job (in my opinion) because the studio cut brings the song to live. It hides the simplicity of the guitar parts under the bells and whistles of the usual BOB approach and it actually brings the entire song together. Infallible is one of my favorite songs of the past few records from pearl jam and i think the studio cut is fantastic with great vocals from Eddie.
live, its a skipper.
Crazy.
Great call on this. I remember hearing the promo snippet (in the "Watch Stone draw with charcoal" video) and thinking how great it sounded. But it really is a plodder on the stage.
Its a great backdrop for eddie to spread his vocal wings and carry a melody but unfortunately he just can't do it live.
So does this mean you really don't like a lot of the newish material?
I love the studio cut. What are you getting at?
The post seems to imply that you don't really like it (based on what you said - it's not interesting and prods along), but it's one of your favorites from the new Pearl Jam era. So I interpreted it as it's the best of the worst for you.
Strat wrote:As far as guitar playing/writing - this song isn't the least bit interesting. It prods, it drags, its dull as fuck and the live performances really show that.
however, this is where BOB actually did a great job (in my opinion) because the studio cut brings the song to live. It hides the simplicity of the guitar parts under the bells and whistles of the usual BOB approach and it actually brings the entire song together. Infallible is one of my favorite songs of the past few records from pearl jam and i think the studio cut is fantastic with great vocals from Eddie.
live, its a skipper.
Crazy.
Great call on this. I remember hearing the promo snippet (in the "Watch Stone draw with charcoal" video) and thinking how great it sounded. But it really is a plodder on the stage.
Its a great backdrop for eddie to spread his vocal wings and carry a melody but unfortunately he just can't do it live.
So does this mean you really don't like a lot of the newish material?
I love the studio cut. What are you getting at?
The post seems to imply that you don't really like it (based on what you said - it's not interesting and prods along), but it's one of your favorites from the new Pearl Jam era. So I interpreted it as it's the best of the worst for you.
No, i was actually commending BOB's work on the track. It would be better live if Ed could hit the notes.
Strat wrote:As far as guitar playing/writing - this song isn't the least bit interesting. It prods, it drags, its dull as fuck and the live performances really show that.
however, this is where BOB actually did a great job (in my opinion) because the studio cut brings the song to live. It hides the simplicity of the guitar parts under the bells and whistles of the usual BOB approach and it actually brings the entire song together. Infallible is one of my favorite songs of the past few records from pearl jam and i think the studio cut is fantastic with great vocals from Eddie.
live, its a skipper.
Crazy.
well said, 62strat. made me rethink the song.
unfortunately, 'infallible' is a detour that doesn't ultimately work for me. whereas something like 'you are' is off-kilter pj in a good way, 'infallible' sounds like them self-consciously trying to do something different without ever quite getting the bat on the ball.
The other Guided Tour of Lightning Bold: Infallible
Infallible is Pearl Jam's foray into Pure Pop Music
it is N Sync meets Christina Aguilera meets Ricky Martin meets J Lo
it sucks in every way
up next: a song from backspacer, that is the best on this tour.
yes, that is how bad this tour is.
no, you cannot receive a refund.
All posts by this account, even those referencing real things, are entirely fictional and are for entertainment purposes only; i.e. very low-quality entertainment. These may contain coarse language and due to their content should not be viewed by anyone
Listening to modern day Pearl Jam must be a lot like staying married to someone who is no longer anything at all like the person you married, in heart or appearance, and who you feel nothing for...but you have shared experience and an old photo album and divorce is expensive and I guess she still has that cute nose.
