Red Mosquito

twoheadedboy wrote:The major flaw, as others have stated, is a lack of execution of what's important, in favor of areas that aren't.

What was done well was quick and clean pop song structures, glossy production (compared to S/T's muddy, almost unmastered sound), and a tone that is positive or wistful throughout. So essentially, you have an album from a band that has completely abandoned the identity it had for the past decade (even pre-Roskilde), for better or for worse. You saw a band that fought the shackles of a repressive ticketing industry and shun an accessible sound and image by firing its glad-handing drummer and putting out "Vitalogy" and "No Code", relent on the ticketing and put out "Yield". Now history was repeating itself, with the band fresh out of its major label deal and one independent album in the can, re-aligning itself with the commercial world, this time with a different kind of master but a more encompassing approach - everything became "productized" and contrived, copying the worst traits of U2, Bon Jovi, Foo Fighters, Offspring, Weezer, and Green Day.

Unfortunately, while that framework was actually a sound concept, Pearl Jam's final product did not bear fruit. The rockers on this album are completely derivative - "Gonna See My Friend" is basically "Bargain". "Got Some" is a bigger Sleater Kinney rip-off than Ed thinks "Sad" is. "Unthought Known" is Pearl Jam ripping off Pearl Jam, specifically "Love Boat Captain" and "Corduroy". "Supersonic" is Pearl Jam ripping off Pearl Jam again, this time as a substandard rendition of "Mankind" (Unforgiven II?) Of course, they started this trend with "Severed Hand" being directly nicked from the groovy/jammy live versions of "Porch" they had been playing for a decade at the time, but at least that song didn't completely suck. Supersonic does.

Then you have the problem with performance quality. All of Mike's leads are mailed in - not since Weezer's Green Album have I heard such uninspired playing, leaving "Force of Nature" DOA. "Just Breathe" and "The End" are fantastic country and folk pop songs, respectively (see: live versions from 2009, Willie Nelson's cover of the former), but Ed's over-stylized vocals render the studio versions nearly unlistenable. Matt also resumes his run of playing the part of "I'm a hired gun and replaceable studio drummer" which may or may not be the fault of Brendan O'Brien, started during the 2003 tour, briefly paused during the 2006 world tour.

"The Fixer" and "Speed of Sound" are flipsides of the same coin; the songs most tied into the theme of this album. I am not a huge "Fixer" fan but to me, this is the most well-executed song here. "Speed of Sound", on the other hand, takes a great demo worthy of Into The Wild/Ukelele Songs/"Just Breathe" or "The End" treatment (as another mentioned) and wrings the originality out of it, making it sound like a more melancholy "Fixer". I put "Johnny Guitar" into the same bucket as "The Fixer", as one of the few successes of this album (though also not a favorite of mine).

Finally, you have the song that is most problematic to me - "Amongst the Waves". At first glance, one might say this is it, the shining example of classic Pearl Jam on this album (if the only one). However, when you dig deeper, you realize:

-It's Ed returning to his overused "water" lyrical palette
-Some of the worst phrases on this album, or ever really, by Ed. "What used to be a house of cards/has turned into a reservoir"? This is the same guy that wrote "I Got Shit", "Daughter", "Corduroy", hell he wrote "Betterman" at 14!
-Besides the terrible metaphors, it's filled with lazy near-rhymes as evidenced above
-Then there's "If not for love I would be drowning/I've seen it work both ways". What does that even MEAN? That he's been "drowning" both in and out of love?
-"Love ain't love until you feel it" Is this a Poison song?
-"Put away my early grave" - he already covers this lyrical ground, a fascination/paranoia with early death, in "The End", which results in making the latter sound less sincere.

This album is really where Ed jumped the shark lyrically. Consider "Unthought Known":

-I take the repeated chorus of "nothing left" to be his definitive statement pertaining to original ideas and muses! It's certainly not relevant to any other part of the song.
-"Dream the dreams of other men/you'll be no one's rival" lolwut (Pearl Jam or EV's Facebook page, can't remember which, offered this nugget up recently as a quotable quote!)
-"Dream the dreams of others/then you will be no one's rival" lolwut again!
-"A distant time, a distant place/So what ya givin'?" uhh, I don't know? I thought it was "Sow what you're given" but apparently I was wrong, which makes it more perplexing.

I had a huge emotional response to this album, but not the one Pearl Jam was going for I think - I realized their days as a relevant rock band were over (some may argue I was 3, 6, 9, or even 14 years late to the party here). I also realized that a relationship I was in was over. I was 27, thriving in a real job where I was doing important things and making good money (for the first time, really), and living closer to the place I wanted to be than since I left at age 9. I had effectively given up on my dream of a career as a musician, which I never completely got behind anyway. Shortly after the release the inevitable breakup happened, and then my mom and grandpa passed away within 10 months of each other. I also realized that the little hope I held that Obama could turn around the establishment a bit after 8 years of Bush was laughable; the damage had already be done and now we're just running out the string. So in a sense, I grew up with this album. However, like a memento from the end of a relationship that ended poorly, it just serves as a reminder to me that life, skill, relationships, and everything is fleeting, and it is folly to expect any of those things to persist; rather such persistence is the exception to the rule. Enjoy things for what they are while they last, and if that's a long time, then that's even better (just don't count on it).

twoheadedboy wrote:So essentially, you have an album from a band that has completely abandoned the identity it had for the past decade (even pre-Roskilde), for better or for worse.

The variables in good rock bands' stylistic character may be innumerable, but invariably the art of rock music is found at that superheated nexus in performance where each musician, while playing his part in the material, hears and feels and anticipates the greater whole as it is being reincarnated. This whole - a multidimensional simultaneity - is at once solid and evanescent: solid enough for a good band to wail on and improvise from, and evanescent enough for a lousy band to never reach no matter how much they may study the work of their inspirations. It is conjured up by three or four players like some phantom. It rises in their midst and at least a few people will pay to witness it. Any real musician chases that phantom in communion with other players until he dies or the marketplace convinces him he's been a chump. Do not confuse musicians with the far more numerous pseud-musicians who are out chasing psychological compensations and simple adrenalin rushes.

The task of the serious listener is to develop an ear for this difference.

In rock music, songwriting may be a significant aid in the conjuring, but it's still essentially a pretext for the art itself. Better songwriting and arrangement provide a more fertile base for performance. But the tonal coloring of the music's chords and notes and the way they ride the rhythm is frequently more telling than the tune itself.

Kevin Davis wrote:I had to look up who Joe Carducci was, assuming that a little insight into where he's coming from might shed some light on why he sounds like such an arrogant, narrow-minded asshat in that quote

Birds in Hell wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:I had to look up who Joe Carducci was, assuming that a little insight into where he's coming from might shed some light on why he sounds like such an arrogant, narrow-minded asshat in that quote

Man, you ought to read the book - that quote has to be some of his mildest, most reflective stuff!

I'll be reading, and hopefully responding, to the rest later - happy new year, Kevin (and everyone).

Kevin Davis wrote:I have to press -- how does "GSMF" sound like "Bargain?"

At some point this practice of pointing out which songs are ripoffs of which other songs is a pointless rhetorical exercise -- it presumes an awareness of the artist's motives which most mere fans do not possess, and excuses assessors from having to evaluate any given song on its own terms. It's an uninteresting avenue of criticism that should be done away with.

Birds in Hell wrote:

twoheadedboy wrote:So essentially, you have an album from a band that has completely abandoned the identity it had for the past decade (even pre-Roskilde), for better or for worse.

This comes close to describing the heart of the issues I have with both Backspacer and Lightning Bolt. I have a remarkably difficult time squaring those songs, at least in their studio-recorded incarnations, with everything else in the band's catalogue up to that point, they genuinely feel as though they're the work of a different band to that which recorded Even Flow, Brain of J. or Sleight of Hand.

One of the key things that makes their best recorded moments so enjoyable, and repeatedly draws me back to their live recordings, is the musical interplay between the band members. Vs is my favourite Pearl Jam record not because it contains their most fully-realised songs but because, more than anything else they've done, it fucking rocks: songs like Animal, Leash or Blood on paper are little more than a few simple riffs but the band's playing makes them completely riveting. That ability to turn a simple musical idea into something powerful and hypnotic is basically the heart of what makes good rock music.

Joe Carducci describes it more accurately than anyone else in Rock and the Pop Narcotic:

The variables in good rock bands' stylistic character may be innumerable, but invariably the art of rock music is found at that superheated nexus in performance where each musician, while playing his part in the material, hears and feels and anticipates the greater whole as it is being reincarnated. This whole - a multidimensional simultaneity - is at once solid and evanescent: solid enough for a good band to wail on and improvise from, and evanescent enough for a lousy band to never reach no matter how much they may study the work of their inspirations. It is conjured up by three or four players like some phantom. It rises in their midst and at least a few people will pay to witness it. Any real musician chases that phantom in communion with other players until he dies or the marketplace convinces him he's been a chump. Do not confuse musicians with the far more numerous pseud-musicians who are out chasing psychological compensations and simple adrenalin rushes.

The task of the serious listener is to develop an ear for this difference.

In rock music, songwriting may be a significant aid in the conjuring, but it's still essentially a pretext for the art itself. Better songwriting and arrangement provide a more fertile base for performance. But the tonal coloring of the music's chords and notes and the way they ride the rhythm is frequently more telling than the tune itself.

I think the most significant problem with the last two records is the almost-total abandonment of preserving that vital musical interaction between the band members, what could also be described as the sense of listening to a "band in a room" that permeates their earlier, better records. The band's playing, even on the ostensibly more rock (at least "rock-esque") songs, feels clipped and moderated as though it exists only to service the song and the vocals. At Pearl Jam's most transcendent moments, I think that relationship is inverted; Ed's vocals act primarily as an instrument and serve to elevate the band's playing, not the other way around.

I think this also explains to some degree why the recent albums appeal to someone like stip whose tastes seem to place much greater value on lyrical craft and the contributions of the vocalist, things I'd probably argue are more or less unimportant to the creation of compelling rock music (with the caveat that I think it's certainly still possible to create good music than values those things, just possibly not good rock music - and I think Pearl Jam's primary strength is as a rock band).

Kevin Davis wrote:Right, but charging an artist with "ripoff" is specifically a judgment of the songwriting process, so in a sense, yes, you do have to be familiar with the songwriting process in order to accurately make that particular claim. The term "ripoff" means that one artist is consciously stealing another artist's ideas and attempting to pass them off as his or her own and hoping to profit from it in some way -- that's what it means to "rip someone off." More than likely, you do not have grounds to make this type of claim. What you're talking about is simply uninspired music that wears its influences on its sleeve -- which is a fair criticism of something, but not "ripoff."

twoheadedboy wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:Right, but charging an artist with "ripoff" is specifically a judgment of the songwriting process, so in a sense, yes, you do have to be familiar with the songwriting process in order to accurately make that particular claim. The term "ripoff" means that one artist is consciously stealing another artist's ideas and attempting to pass them off as his or her own and hoping to profit from it in some way -- that's what it means to "rip someone off." More than likely, you do not have grounds to make this type of claim. What you're talking about is simply uninspired music that wears its influences on its sleeve -- which is a fair criticism of something, but not "ripoff."

You are correct that my use of "ripoff" is overly simplistic and maybe not quite correct, though you do also hit upon my feelings about this in your next post that it's being a bit pedantic...no one else seems to have taken my use of "ripoff" as they literally and intentionally set out to rip off The Who

Birds in Hell wrote: I think the most significant problem with the last two records is the almost-total abandonment of preserving that vital musical interaction between the band members, what could also be described as the sense of listening to a "band in a room" that permeates their earlier, better records. The band's playing, even on the ostensibly more rock (at least "rock-esque") songs, feels clipped and moderated as though it exists only to service the song and the vocals. At Pearl Jam's most transcendent moments, I think that relationship is inverted; Ed's vocals act primarily as an instrument and serve to elevate the band's playing, not the other way around.

I think this also explains to some degree why the recent albums appeal to someone like stip whose tastes seem to place much greater value on lyrical craft and the contributions of the vocalist, things I'd probably argue are more or less unimportant to the creation of compelling rock music (with the caveat that I think it's certainly still possible to create good music than values those things, just possibly not good rock music - and I think Pearl Jam's primary strength is as a rock band).