Ledbetterman10 wrote:Kevin Davis wrote:First listen and I'm really disappointed in "Mind Your Manners." This is pretty much exactly the sort of thing I was holding out hope that this album wouldn't be. The bridge sounds like the fucking Offspring.
Well then what the heck were you hoping for?
Where to start.
Well, I'll start by just being as frank as I can think to be: I was hoping for something other than a straightforward rock song.
I realize Pearl Jam are a rock band, and that to a certain extent, straightforward rock songs are what they do. But you asked me what I was hoping for, and this is my honest answer. I'm just tired of this type of song. It doesn't necessarily sound like any one song in their catalog, and yet, if someone asked me to think up in my mind what "modern Pearl Jam" sounds like, this is pretty much the exact thing I'd think up. So, in that regard, I guess the one simple thing I'd hoped for is that Pearl Jam would transcend my expectations. It's been a long time since they've transcended my expectations. I miss them transcending my expectations.
With a few exceptions that have managed to seep through over the years, punk rock does not interest me. I completely missed my window for developing an appreciation for it, and it's not a music that lends itself well to discovering for the first time on historical grounds. When I was about 20 I bought the 4CD Rhino box set "No Thanks! The 70's Punk Rebellion" and hated about 98% of the material on it--to my mind it was musically unexciting and thematically juvenile, and the "energy" that was its supposed cornerstone just felt like a complete farce to me. It's not the sort of music I care to hear a band like Pearl Jam, a group comprised of five people with a tremendous collective musical range and who have in the past made textured, nuanced, sonically diverse records that posed questions about what the limits of that range might be, fall back on as fifty year-old men. I keep trying to come up with a better of way of saying this, one that doesn't just make me sound like a closed-minded old grump, but anything else just keeps feeling disingenuous. I wanted a song that wasn't just five guys grinding away on a few power chords and flailing about as per usual. The part in the middle sounds exactly like the kind of manufactured punk cheese that they've made it a point to publicly lambast in the past.
(On that same note, I've reached my breaking point with Ed's redundant lyrical themes and bullshit new age platitudes. "Self-realized and metaphysically redeemed"--sounds like he's about one unthought away from commissioning Sylvia Browne to write the liner notes to his next solo album, which will be packaged just like "No Code" only using tarot cards instead of Polaroids.)
You're god damned right. 
