liebzz wrote:So I listened to Lightning Bolt today on my run since I have been mostly immersed in Gigaton since it came out.
I still don’t think it is a bad album at all - in fact it is mostly good, but brought down by a few poor decisions that separates it in a bad way from an album like Gigaton (which actually has a similar flow but it just crafted WAY better and sounds WAY better).
The top bad decision is the polished production which leaves the songs without the same life - they all would have sounded much better with a more natural sounding dynamic or by just altering something about the sound. The songs themselves are mostly pretty good.
On the songs, a few different touches and this album at least passes Backspacer. Sirens kills the momentum of the album pretty early on. It’s production, and frankly Eddie Vedder, turn a strong instrumental into a cheese fest. Roger Waters should have had a guest writing credit here somewhere and helped Vedder with this tune. The place he’s coming from is right on - a sort of existential fear - but the lyrics and vocal delivery comes across as a half baked Come Back when this should have been more like a Nothing As It Seems.
Lightning Bolt the song needs to get rid of the fade out and include the end jam on the live version and it’s good to go.
Infallible needs to be redone - cheesing our the chorus and dulling the musical input of the rest of the band there ruins what is such a promising song in the vein of a Tremor Christ.
The list goes on but basically it comes down to looking at a record where there’s a ton of good ideas and potential going on, but on too many of the songs someone made a poor decision and took the song in the wrong direction.
Inspired by the post, I attempted this experiment yesterday. Sometimes a good album has a way of retroactively illuminating its lesser predecessors, and maybe
Lightning Bolt had some glow to glean from
Gigaton's shining star. And truthfully, it's been a good few years since I've listened to
Lightning Bolt at all; it's entirely possible I'm amplifying its weaknesses in my memory.
Neither of these things were true. In fact, I think it actually sounded worse than I remember, and the songs that stood out as bright spots were way different than they've been in the past. "My Father's Son" and "Swallowed Whole" were always my two favorite songs on here, and they didn't even feel among the better tracks this time; "Swallowed Whole" just felt kind of there, and "My Father's Son" I genuinely didn't enjoy -- I'm not sure any other Pearl Jam song in recent memory has tanked so hard for me. "Sleeping By Myself" I think is my favorite song here by default; I like the song a lot, certainly better in its original iteration, but the arrangement the band gives it has some imagination even if the production does not.
There are a handful of other songs that aren't wholly unpleasant, but none of them are wholly successful, either; all have asterisks. Of course then there are some that are wholly unpleasant. And the production job requires no further commentary.
All in all, it definitely makes me thankful for
Gigaton.
