McParadigm wrote:I also think Riot Act is 9 good Pearl Jam songs packaged with 5 Eddie Vedder solo works, which have a very different personality and don’t really belong with those other tracks.
What are the five you're thinking of -- "Can't Keep," "Love Boat Captain," "I Am Mine," "Thumbing My Way," and "Green Disease" I am guessing? Or "Arc" maybe?
I really like what the band brings to all of these, especially "Can't Keep" -- the uke version is nice but, much like they did with "Sleeping By Myself," the band transformed it into something surprising and much different from the solo version. No other song in the PJ catalog sounds like it, and the tone it establishes for
Riot Act right at the beginning of the record couldn't be established by a different song from the same batch. Perhaps if they'd taken an entirely different approach to recording the album, something similar would have materialized independently, or maybe the record would have been differently defined in a way that would feel equally compelling to me, but without the ability to say such things for sure, I'm glad "Can't Keep" exists as it does.
What the band brings to the other songs is less dramatic perhaps, but (to me anyway) it's enough to claim them. I think a lot of what I like about the
No Code through
Riot Act period is that sense of everyone's songs having a place in the mix, of everyone having the space able to singularly direct a creative work, as opposed to being expected to dump fragments of ideas into a collective melting pot and see what bubbles up; to me the way those varying compositional voices (Ed's included) play off each other is ultimately what makes those records feel like the dynamic things they are. In a
Dark Matter-type environment, and with that that all-for-one-and-one-for-all writing style, you would lose songs like "Get Right" and "You Are" and "All or None" and "Cropduster" and "Help Help" and "Ghost," and maybe those would be welcome omissions for some, but if I'm honest those are the flavors and spices that have kept Pearl Jam at the fore of my listening for 30 years. The more communal writing environment always and immediately favors Ed's compositional voice, because while there is a sense of collective democracy in the music, where everyone's voice matters but only to a point, (most likely) all the lyrics and vocal melodies are coming from him. He's great at it, and his efforts certainly help make
Dark Matter a really strong record. But the stuff that's missing...well, I miss it. And I think the reason that "Ed solo song" template feels so prevalent is because he's the only band member whose voice as a solitary writer has been allowed to continue dominating records beyond that middle period, such that now we're retroactively going back to songs like "Thumbing My Way" and "I Am Mine" and hearing foreshadowings of "Just Breathe" and "Future Days" in them. But they didn't feel like "Ed solo songs" at the time, and in my opinion they still don't in the context of the record they're on, whose one creative through-line perhaps is this concept of "solo" songs (by all the members, save for Mike), brought to the band to be seen through to fruition.
To that end, there is a quasi-White Album feel to that album, and really to all their stuff from 1996-2003, and a vulnerability in that openness to letting in some odd and unusual lights, that really speaks to and compels me. I connect with the sense of "lost" on those albums more than I connect with the sense of "found" on
Dark Matter. I know better than to assume that they could just fall effortlessly back into that space if they wanted to, and if the way they're working now works for them, then that's what I want -- if they go out on 2-3 more albums in the style and at the quality level of
Dark Matter, I'd be incredibly happy with that. But I'm also glad that it's not the approach they've taken all along, because I think we'd have missed out on a lot of great stuff.