Era of the moment: 2001-2002

[nightmareblack0206]

Ok so this to me was the time these guys finally can be "free" so they rush thru RA and actually finishing album off of 1 take. Clearly can hear PJ not "trying"

Little did they know next album they weren't so free

[Jorge]

what

[Kevin Davis]

"Riot Act" is still my second favorite PJ album--a great case for how a work of half-baked but largely uninhibited creativity can surpass a work that coheres more completely but rests on its laurels.

Other than that, though, 2001 and 2002 were largely inactive years for the band. There's not much of an "era" to speak of.

[bodysnatcher]

"Riot Act" is still my second favorite PJ album--a great case for how a work of half-baked but largely uninhibited creativity can surpass a work that coheres more completely but rests on its laurels.

I like this thought. Riot Act, in a way, reminds me of Hail To The Thief... in that it seemed both bands were just trying to rinse their hands and minds clean and just recording every idea they were coming up with at the moment so they could start fresh later on. Not in a bad way, but in a cathartic way.

[VinylGuy]

"Riot Act" is still my second favorite PJ album--a great case for how a work of half-baked but largely uninhibited creativity can surpass a work that coheres more completely but rests on its laurels.

I like this thought. Riot Act, in a way, reminds me of Hail To The Thief... in that it seemed both bands were just trying to rinse their hands and minds clean and just recording every idea they were coming up with at the moment so they could start fresh later on. Not in a bad way, but in a cathartic way.

Thats a good way of calling this record...a half baked work with a large uninhibited creativity. Most of the songs should have been amazing and they sound like a good demo.

Still...cant keep, save you, LBC, I am mine..Thumbing, You are..

[Norah]

Guys, Riot Act is fantastic as is.

[stip]

this was a tough era for me. Although I liked Riot Act a lot when it first came out (as tends to be the case with all their records) I really needed Pearl Jam to write a record that lived up to that title. I had built up the story in my head that this was going to be the first major artistic statement to challenge Bush. The title was promising, the cover art was great, and I am Mine was a terrific song to boot. But the record was a disappointment. It's not that the songs feel like demos, although Eddie's vocals sometimes have a scratch take feel to them. It's just that either that too many songs weren't that good, or the performances (mostly Eddie) didn't work for me. I think the languid and weary feel to most of these songs can work great (I am Mine, Can't Keep, even Save you, oddly enough), but that's really it. The rest of the songs are a bit weak or could have been really good with different vocal choices.

Excellent tour though. I guess that's the 03-05 block.

[Kevin Davis]

The songs themselves don't sound like demos, per se, but in a lot of places the ideas sort of do--which is what I love about the record, and what I suspect many of its detractors dislike about it. A lot of the songs are creative dead ends captured on film for posterity anyway, creating a kind of fascinating, grotesque adventure collage for those willing to sit through it. Every band should have at least one record like that, and most of the great ones do.

[Norah]

Team Kevin Davis.

[stip]

The songs themselves don't sound like demos, per se, but in a lot of places the ideas sort of do--which is what I love about the record, and what I suspect many of its detractors dislike about it. A lot of the songs are creative dead ends captured on film for posterity anyway, creating a kind of fascinating, grotesque adventure collage for those willing to sit through it. Every band should have at least one record like that, and most of the great ones do.

fair enough, and as I've said before I like all Pearl Jam's records and think they all do something different and important within the catalog. But having said that, this is the album I am the least likely to listen to.

[stip]

mike is really great on this album

[epilogue]

Guys, Riot Act is fantastic as is.

Yep.

[McParadigm]

I adore the sound and the playing on Riot Act...this is probably the best sonic document this decidedly unaudiophilic band ever managed....and I like a good number of the songs, too.

But this was the first time I really found myself flinching over and over again at an album's lyrical content. This was never a great band for wording, perhaps, but they tended to be great at building the phrase within the moment...writing lines that felt a mile deep in exactly the only context in which they were heard. Here, we have ""I never knew soap made you taller," "he's not a leader he's a Texas leaguer," "there's no wrong or right, but I'm sure there's good and bad / The questions linger overhead," "It's a disease, and they're all green," and "don't see some men as half empty, see them as half full of shit." It's like a paint by numbers of Ed's worst habits.

It is reasonable to argue that you could get by that, too....but this is also an intentionally political and philosophical album. It's striving for deep thought. And Ed's simple, direct earnestness plays out better in concert than it does in studio, when those are the intentions. So while the album does occasionally manage insight ("can we help that our destinations are the ones we've been before?"), or succeeds in connecting larger feelings to an inner, personal need ("It's a hopeless situation, and I'm starting to believe..."), or even manages to lean abstract by using visual imagery to communicate the indefinable feeling inherent to the physical moment ("keeping your boots on....roll with the now...hot to the touch")....usually, it's as full of high school level word play as it is with clever phrases, and that's a real drag for me.

I also genuinely appreciate Ed's continued search for a new way to be Ed...I wish he hadn't given that up and gone back to just pretending he was still 1994 guy on the next record. But there's a sense of non-ambition to this album in terms of creative momentum. He doesn't want to be that guy, here...you know the one I mean...and he's not really trying to be Binaural Ed or Yield, either...but he just doesn't seem to know what to be instead of those things. Some people accuse him of sounding bored on this record...I don't think that's it at all. I think he sounds like his artistic bent is leading him in one direction, and his desired output is pigeon-holing him down another...he can't find a way to bridge the two into something new, so he just lets his resulting hesitancy inform his vocal sound and hope that it works. It actually does...or, most of the time....but on a record this artistically lost he is badly needed as a unifying voice, and he's just not in a place to give it that.

In a lot of ways, I see Riot Act as an afterbirth of Binaural. Binaural was driven by this initially ambitious (if unfocused) desire to redesign what 'Pearl Jam' meant sonically, and to capture as real an "in the moment" document as they could of that recreation. The effort collapsed hard, and the band ultimately walked away with some great sessions but a very frustrated final product. Not long afterwards, they experienced a traumatic event that very clearly and very crucially influenced how they approached every future decision. Some of that fallout is what causes Riot Act's more withdrawing tendencies. This is a fairly young moment in the life of this band that has suddenly lost a crucial amount of creative and momentive confidence. It is still influenced by those desires...not a lot, but just this side of enough to matter....and it still looks for textural ways to make the old sounds feel new. It also refuses to pursue the status quo, almost knee jerking into odd melodies and styles, and it tries to "capture the moment" like Binaural did, albeit in far more conventional ways than that project. Still, to my mind, it is mostly a bridge between Binaural's pie-eyed belief that, if they just try hard enough goddamn it, amazing things will start to happen, and the band's eventual huddling preference for kind of being Pearl Jam...like, all the time. It's the last definable moment (fingers crossed on the new stuff) when they made a record that didn't seem to start with them saying "what can we do that people will really like?" It's also the first time they walked into a studio and didn't carve out a space that added whole new chapters to their sonic bible.

So Riot Act, to my ears, is the sound of a deep and anxious uncertainty that ultimately bridged the post-No Code acid trip and the later retrospective-heavy, self-titled cocooning era.

[nightmareblack0206]

mike is really great on this album

[VinylGuy]

mike is really great on this album

Mike is incredible on this record yeah...most of his stuff is top notch.

[Norah]

Guys, McParadigm just fucking nailed it.

[VinylGuy]

I agree with some of what Mcp says there, specially about Eddie. I loved the record when it came out, it had a pop element and still was pearl jam, and it seemed that Mike leads were back.
With time, most of those songs felt flat, unfinished, specially in Eddie´s vocal delivery...even if he did it on purpose, his restrained vocals dont help.

Some of the 2001 and 2002 shows are amazing though, specially Bridge Benefit Concert from 2001...really nice....and those Showbox shows too.

[WtOB?]

Guys, McParadigm just fucking nailed it.

He did that in the Mind Your Manners thread too. Good form.

[stip]

But this was the first time I really found myself flinching over and over again at an album's lyrical content. This was never a great band for wording, perhaps, but they tended to be great at building the phrase within the moment

that's a really nice description

[lowlight79]

Nothing happened during this span, this was the most quite time of the band's career. They played what 4 shows in two years?