Red Mosquito

it's really nice to be able to use DOTC as a counterpoint to LB now. it gives a perfect example of what pretty much nothing on LB achieves (save *maybe* Father's Son). none of the tracks on LB really surprise or take sudden turns or levitate into a completely different vibe.

DOTC starts in one place and each band member organically takes it to another level. before you know it, you're into the final minute of the song with the swirling vocals and stand back when the spirit comes. that stuff is eye opening. i don't think i felt that way at all with LB except for the MFS bridge.

like strat, i can still find enjoyment in LB, it's just their least compelling record to my ears.

i'm glad stip reps for it though. somebody has to hold the line.

evenslow wrote:like strat, i can still find enjoyment in LB, it's just their least compelling record to my ears.

Probably 2/3 of the songs on LB I can enjoy passively, depending on the day, though hardly ever in the context of trying to sit through them all at once, and in the end I feel no fondness for the album as a whole. Part of it for me is that the two opening tracks are literally two of my least favorite PJ songs ever -- bottom 5 songs, both of them. It's hard for any album to redeem itself after starting off like that.

Many of the LB songs have a kind of weird duality where I find they work through one lens and completely fail through another, usually ending at this net-zero average where I just find myself not wanting to listen to them. But on the right day, the fleeting moodiness of "Pendulum" can take precedence over its compositional failures, the sentiment and craftsmanship in "Sirens" can subsume its cheesy production and uncomfortable vocal performance -- so on and so forth. But these moments are rare (and usually accidental) enough that I hardly ever seek the album out.

Kevin Davis wrote:

evenslow wrote:like strat, i can still find enjoyment in LB, it's just their least compelling record to my ears.

the sentiment and craftsmanship in "Sirens" can subsume its cheesy production and uncomfortable vocal performance

Can it though?

I really do not like sirens even a little and have a hard time believing some of the praise its gotten here.
Its painfully cheesy

Strat wrote:Stip - not being a live listener you should maybe check out love versions of lightning bolt. Most fall completely flat live and are exposed for how bland the tracks generally are. Mind your manners and lightning bolt are the exception. They don’t play any others really

Look, I’m strat, I can still find tons of enjoyment listening to the bolt but it’s a formulaic Pearl Jam it because pearl jam doing their best to be pearl jam. It’s super off putting to me and that is why I rank it at the bottom.

maybe - but I’m not convinced that a ton of the classic songs would sail by mostly on their merits if debuted in 2013

I remember pendulum and yellow moon sounding good

Noaheb wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:

evenslow wrote:like strat, i can still find enjoyment in LB, it's just their least compelling record to my ears.

the sentiment and craftsmanship in "Sirens" can subsume its cheesy production and uncomfortable vocal performance

Can it though?

I really do not like sirens even a little and have a hard time believing some of the praise its gotten here.
Its painfully cheesy

it works well for me as a singular (or near singular) moment in the catalog. there is space for cheese, sincerely delivered, in a 175 song catalog moment. an album of sirens is a problem

Noaheb wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:

evenslow wrote:like strat, i can still find enjoyment in LB, it's just their least compelling record to my ears.

the sentiment and craftsmanship in "Sirens" can subsume its cheesy production and uncomfortable vocal performance

Can it though?

I really do not like sirens even a little and have a hard time believing some of the praise its gotten here.
Its painfully cheesy

For me, sure. Honestly I'd go so far as to say that "Sirens" is the only LB song that has improved for me with time, though that's still a fairly qualified statement.

Cheesiness is just a characteristic that bothers me less and less as I get older. Pearl Jam have made other songs that are equally as exaggerated as "Sirens" over the years, just in other ways.

good point. sirens feels no more out of place to me now than a once or why go

we had 2 pre-release singles for lightning bolt. will we get a third for gigaton? maybe a week or two before the drop - especially since neither if these seem to have caught on the way the backspacer/lbolt singles did?

I'm at the point of my life where I prefer overtly cheesy songs to something trying to be super profound or deep (i.e. Present Tense or I'm Open). The cheese in the case of Sirens feel sincere.

stip wrote:we had 2 pre-release singles for lightning bolt. will we get a third for gigaton? maybe a week or two before the drop - especially since neither if these seem to have caught on the way the backspacer/lbolt singles did?

We will. The initial teaser had those three symbols. Two have been revealed with the first two singles.

i imagine itll be one of the last two songs then. Just Breathe and Sirens were both pretty big hits

[/quote]

Sirens main issue for me (other than the cheesiness) is that lyrically it can't decide what it is. But this is a well trodden discussion.

Kevin Davis wrote:

Noaheb wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:

evenslow wrote:like strat, i can still find enjoyment in LB, it's just their least compelling record to my ears.

the sentiment and craftsmanship in "Sirens" can subsume its cheesy production and uncomfortable vocal performance

Can it though?

I really do not like sirens even a little and have a hard time believing some of the praise its gotten here.
Its painfully cheesy

For me, sure. Honestly I'd go so far as to say that "Sirens" is the only LB song that has improved for me with time, though that's still a fairly qualified statement.

Cheesiness is just a characteristic that bothers me less and less as I get older. Pearl Jam have made other songs that are equally as exaggerated as "Sirens" over the years, just in other ways.

Additionally, people have been making fun of eds voice since 1991. herrr durrrr....etc.... Yet here we are now still making fun of his weird vocal inflections.

None of this is really new.

Sirens, I love. I love the cheese. I love the lyrics, the sentiment. Especially in my life right now and what im dealing with "the grace by which we live our lives with death over our shoulder"

Fuck. That gets me.

Strat wrote:

Tuolumne wrote:

Strat wrote:Now hearing 2 tracks. So distinctively different from one another, this tidbit excites me ....

Seven O’Clock,” which evokes trippy, Pink Floyd vibes and finds him in full falsetto as the song winds down. “That one started as a jam early in the recording sessions, and then they moved on and did other things,” Evans tells Variety. “We went through and pulled out a bunch of different cool moments and cut them together, and then the band layered a bunch of new things on top of it.”

The story is that they took their time with writing this album. The above quote excites me in that they allowed themselves time and also the magic of a studio to create the best version of whatever piece they were working on .

The last two were obvious quick attempts in the studio to bash out songs and release an album. They were fine for what they went for, but i really wanted them to show me they could be "artists" again. Whatever that means. But an intense interest in their craft.

So far....so good.

Nope. The idea that they didn't toil over Backspacer and LB is a crock of shit. Similarly, that they sweated over No Code is not true either. If there's a criticism for Backspacer and LB, it's that they didn't just let the songs breathe enough. Maybe they toiled TOO hard on those albums. The CLEARLY strained over ever nanosecond on those albums. Especially Backspacer. Every melody, snare hit, bridge, transition ... it's plainly obvious to me that they really worked hard on those albums. Most of all, it's how lean they made it. Not saying they are rock canon masterpieces (well, Backspacer is killer but hey), but not putting "atmosphere" in a record is an aesthetic choice, it is not a lazy one. I guess 'studio art' is considered to be more serious, but there are others ways to be 'artistes', and tinkering in the studio is just one way of doing it.

Umm. You are yelling at a guy who likes backspacer.

But they legit had what...2 sessions for lightning bolt? There are countless interviews around backspacer where ed specifically went with first takes and decided not to toil over the lyrics like he had in the past. They wanted to cut the fat.

Im not saying they didnt work hard. I never said anything about atmosphere.

Tuolomne, you are always responding out of pent up anger towards RM and i can't quite figure out why.

Um... I guess this is when someone goes into some meta- state of 'RM and Tuolumne' discussion, whereas I'm just talking about nothing but the music, so while you do that .....

Actual hours logged in the recording studio is far from the only indication on how hard a band works on an album. There's the writing studio, rehearsal studio, demo process, band discussions going over song details, etc. If I remember correctly, the non singing members of the band all took a trip to Montana to work out some of the songs. I'm sure there were many instances where they really dissected each and every song. It's clear to me, every second on Backspacer counts. Every melody resolves into a good transitions, every bridge is tight, there's lots of efficient chord and tempo changes, I love every second of it. They were almost clinical in their efficiency, but still inspired.

Gigaton may end up being "the best thing they've done since Riot Act", but "Sirens" is up there; I love it, it's gold

evenslow wrote:it's really nice to be able to use DOTC as a counterpoint to LB now. it gives a perfect example of what pretty much nothing on LB achieves (save *maybe* Father's Son). none of the tracks on LB really surprise or take sudden turns or levitate into a completely different vibe.

DOTC starts in one place and each band member organically takes it to another level. before you know it, you're into the final minute of the song with the swirling vocals and stand back when the spirit comes. that stuff is eye opening. i don't think i felt that way at all with LB except for the MFS bridge.

like strat, i can still find enjoyment in LB, it's just their least compelling record to my ears.

i'm glad stip reps for it though. somebody has to hold the line.

infallible feels ‘fresher’ to me than My Fathers Son, but you’re right - none of it is as left field as dotc (though thats the case for most records of theirs)

Know this isn't the LB thread, but, the "cheese" arguments re: Sirens make little sense to me. Not my favorite, by any means, but, I'd personally much prefer the earnestness and emotional honesty of a song like Sirens, if that's where they happen to be as a band. I'm also at a point in my life where I appreciate a song like this, and I'm pretty sure I'll value it more w/ each passing year.

LetMeSleep wrote:

30 days (maybe less) shed my skin at last.