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Post by Paul on Apr 17, 2006 9:42:14 GMT -5
 Did anyone watch SNL? Holy shit! "Severed Hand" is fucking incredible!!! World Wide Suicide was, meh, but Severed Hand rocked my world! Mr. Holzman, you have high praise for 'Binarual', well I think you'll really like Severed Hand...It has a "Porch" (Ten) meets "Insignificance" (Binaural) feel to it; very impressive, and it kicks the shit out of WWS.
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Post by Paul on Apr 17, 2006 9:59:20 GMT -5
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Post by Thorngrub on Apr 17, 2006 10:14:18 GMT -5
dammit.
DAMN it!
*I missed SNL* :'c
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Post by Paul on Apr 17, 2006 10:16:45 GMT -5
well when you get to a computer that has speakers, check out that link....it's really good quality as well...
Ms. Lohen (sp?) seems to really like Pearl Jam; don't know what to make of that.
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Post by Paul on Apr 19, 2006 10:59:28 GMT -5
Well for anyone who gives a shit, I liked 8 of the 13 songs on the new Pearl Jam album...2 of them have potential, but I just couldn't tell after only one listen.
If those two songs end up on my good side that will be 10 of 13 which makes for a solid B / 4 out of 5 stars....I'll have to wait till May 2nd for further analysis...
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Post by Paul on Apr 19, 2006 11:07:24 GMT -5
Oh, by the way, there is not one Pearl Jam album out there where I like every song...Yield comes closest, but that's not my favorite album by them.
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Post by Paul on Apr 19, 2006 11:45:49 GMT -5
Don't know why I bother... Anyway, here's the new cover of Rolling Stone  |
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Post by Paul on Apr 20, 2006 22:11:55 GMT -5
Holy Shit!!! Yet another reason why Pearl Jam is the coolest fucking band on the planet! ------------------------------------------------- Pearl Jam, The Ten Club and CBS's The Late Show with David Letterman are excited to offer up this unique opportunity to watch the band perform a short set immediately following their performance on Dave's show on May 4th in the historic Ed Sullivan Theatre. You must be a current Ten Club member as of April 19th and live in either New York, Connecticut or New Jersey to be eligible. Here's how it will work- This is a first come first serve opportunity. Log on to www.pearljam.com Friday, April 21st before 1 PM Eastern time. Go to the GOODS section and LOG IN to your Ten Club account. Then at 1 PM Eastern, click the Tickets category and you'll have the opportunity to obtain 2 tickets to the show. Only the eligible Ten Club member will be allowed to pick up the tickets. A government-issued ID will be required for entry into the show. Now here's the best part. It's free....with a couple of catches. First, we're going to ask you for your credit card information. Your card will not be charged, but we need it to verify your transaction. Second, you ABSOLUTELY must be able to participate in this event if you are able to get tickets. Failure to show up for this event may have an impact on whether you are considered for future promotions from the Ten Club. There are only 350 seats in the Ed Sullivan Theatre, so we only have 175 pairs to give away. These are general admission tickets. If you are lucky enough to get a pair of these tickets, you will receive an email on May 2nd, explaining how to pick up your tickets. Keep in mind this show will take place at 6:00 PM Eastern time in New York City. Participants will need to be there by 4:30 PM on May 4th. If you can't make it at that time, don't bother trying to get tickets!!!! Best of luck- Ten Club Staff
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Post by frag on Apr 20, 2006 22:24:29 GMT -5
I'm probably going to catch them in Grand Rapids. Can't wait to hear the new album. Glad you dig most of it Paul!
Best album since No Code? I sure hope so!
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Post by Paul on Apr 21, 2006 9:42:26 GMT -5
Some thoughts about the new album...
The guitars are BIG on this album; that’s what’s been missing since Yield….Stone and Mike tear this album up. Jeff is also doing some really cool things on bass, and Matt finally sounds comfortable w/ the band in the studio; still like Jack better, but this is Matt’s best drumming w/ the band so far.
My tops after two listens:
Severed Hand
Life Wasted
Parachutes
Big Wave
Marker In the Sand
Unemployable
Come Back
Comatose
Inside Job
Army Reserve
World Wide Suicide
Gone
Wasted Reprise
Honestly, pretty much every song is good; this may not be the best Pearl Jam album, but it’s more consistent than a lot of their other albums….(Vs., Vitalogy, Binaural, Riot Act,). I’d say maybe 5 songs are really good/great, 4 are good, and 3 are pretty good, and 1 is take it or leave it.
I now kinda dig Marker In The Sand; didn't t care for it so much the other day, but the tone of Stone’s guitar help sell me on it…The chorus is a little cheesy (in my opinion) but the rest of the song rocks…It kinda teases you a bit. There is this simple, raw guitar riff and you think the songs gonna bust out and be heavy, but it’s not, but it is….It almost sounds like it could be two different songs; that’s why it didn’t grab me at first.
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Post by Paul on Apr 21, 2006 11:45:34 GMT -5
Rolling Stone Review of Pearl Jam
4 Stars
Wartime, for everything else that's wrong with it, brings out the best in Pearl Jam: the power-chord brawn, contrary righteousness and metallic-KO songwriting sense. The band's second and third albums, 1993's bluntly titled Vs. and 1994's Vitalogy, are as good as modern rock-in-opposition gets: shotgun guitars, incendiary bass and drums, and Eddie Vedder's scalded-dog howl, all discharged in backs-to-the-wall fury and union.This album, Pearl Jam's first studio release in four years and their best in ten, is more of that top electric combat.
With a difference. The Pearl Jam on Pearl Jam is not the band that famously responded to overnight platinum by going to war with the world. Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron are now fully at war in the world, unrepentant veterans of the campaign trail (the Vote for Change Tour) and right-wing crucifixion (the "Bushleaguer" uproar) who have made the most overtly partisan -- and hopeful -- record of their lives. For Vedder, the 2004 election was not a total loss. "Why swim the channel just to get this far?/Halfway there, why would you turn around?" he demands in the first song, "Life Wasted," in a ragged, run-on bark. And it's all forward ho from there. As immediate and despairing as breaking news from Baghdad -- "World Wide Suicide" opens with a newspaper casualty report -- Pearl Jam is also as big and brash in fuzz and backbone as Led Zeppelin's Presence.
That's not just rock-critic shorthand. However you define grunge music, Pearl Jam didn't play it. They were, from jump street, a classic rock band, building their bawl with iron-guitar bones and an arena-vocal lust that came right from Zeppelin, early-Seventies Who and mid-Eighties U2 (with distortion instead of the Edge's glass-guitar harmonics). But Pearl Jam have not been this consistently dirty and determined in the studio since they subbed for Crazy Horse on Neil Young's 1995 Mirror Ball. I own two complete tours' worth of Pearl Jam's official-bootleg concert CDs, and this record's five-song blastoff ("Life Wasted," "World Wide Suicide," "Comatose," "Severed Hand" and "Marker in the Sand") is right up there in punch and crust with my favorite nights in that live series (Seattle, 11/6/00, and New Orleans, 4/8/03, to name two). And whenever the guitars take over, which is a lot -- Gossard and McCready's slugging AC/DC-like intro to "Life Wasted"; McCready's wild wah-wah ride in "Big Wave"; the way he cracks Vedder's gloom in "Parachutes" like heat lightning -- it reminds me that Gossard and McCready deserved to be on our 2003 "Greatest Guitarists" list. Permit me to admit it here: I screwed up.
That's more confession than you'll ever hear in the Bush White House. But talk-show pit bulls will be disappointed to find that Vedder doesn't waste his breath naming names here, except for a glancing reference to "the president" in "World Wide Suicide." There is blame, but it's spread all around. "Now you got both sides/Claiming killing in God's name/But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently," Vedder sings in "Marker in the Sand," from inside Gossard and McCready's crossfire and the saturation bombing of Ament and Cameron. There is dread too -- lots of it. "Army Reserve" is a midtempo elegy for the real Army Reserve, the wives and children who serve in worry, behind the lines. (The dark harmonies crowding Vedder's low, grainy vocal feel like ghosts in waiting.) And "Unemployable" is just half a story, with a soaring-melancholy chorus. The song ends before the guy with the pink slip can find a new job. But Vedder's opening scene -- the fist with the ring that says jesus saves, flying with helpless anger into a metal locker -- is lesson enough. In multinational capitalism run riot, the bottom line doesn't care about religion or party line. We're all expendable.
And we're all accountable. The politics on Pearl Jam are not those of right or left but of engagement and responsibility. In "Life Wasted," Vedder at least partly mocks his old self, the one that wore success and the leverage that came with it like sackcloth: "Darkness comes in waves, tell me/Why invite it to stay?" But there is only determined optimism in Pearl Jam's superb finish, "Inside Job." The song starts quietly, then climbs and peaks like a combination of "Stairway to Heaven" and the Who's "The Song Is Over" -- a mirror image of Vedder's stumble through each line from night into light. "I will not lose my faith," he promises under thunderclap guitars, with such assurance that even if you don't agree with anything else on this record, you believe him.
DAVID FRICKE
(Posted: Apr, 21 2006)
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Post by Paul on Apr 21, 2006 12:36:42 GMT -5
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Post by Paul on Apr 21, 2006 12:52:30 GMT -5
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Post by Paul on Apr 24, 2006 8:49:31 GMT -5
Newsweek Article -- first PJ profile since Vedder was on the cover back in 1992/3?? msnbc.msn.com/id/12442610/site/newsweek/Pearl Jam Comes Alive The reluctant rockers return with a new CD that might just bring back the fame they love to hate. By Lorraine Ali Newsweek May 1, 2006 issue - Eddie Vedder writes songs on a manual typewriter, carries important papers in a 1940s suitcase, keeps his credit cards in a plastic Batman wallet and wears his beat-up lumberjack boots over a pair of blue argyle socks. He prefers to talk politics rather than Pearl Jam, and has a 21-month-old daughter who likes to sing Daddy's new single, "World Wide Suicide," during play group. "She dances around singing 'Suicide, suicide'," says Vedder, "and I have to wonder what the other parents are thinking." Such personal tidbits feel like a full-length tell-all memoir when you consider that Pearl Jam has been, and remains, a band that guards its privacy. After the success of their 1991 debut, "Ten," which sold nearly 10 million copies, the Seattle group stopped making videos, shunned endorsements and shied away from almost all self-promotion. And each subsequent album proved less accessible than its predecessor. (Can you name the last two Pearl Jam records?) But despite their refusal to play the game—or because of it—Pearl Jam is still considered one of the last rock bands that matter. "What's threatened by being out there all the time is your sense of normalcy as a human on this planet," says Vedder, 41, sitting in the band's headquarters on the industrial outskirts of Seattle. "You start making decisions based on public perception of who you are. I've seen people who go for it. They are that thing, and they're really good at it. They somehow made the jump still intact. Me? I ran screaming the other way." You can hear some of that screaming—along with a lot of singing and a little pleasant harmonizing—on Pearl Jam's new self-titled CD. It's their eighth, and their first album with J Records (Alicia Keys, Chris Brown). It's also the most immediate and relevant CD that Pearl Jam has done since 1994's "Vitalogy." But is anyone still listening? So far, yes. Radio is finally playing the band again, the single "World Wide Suicide" hit No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart, and there's a high-decibel buzz around the album, to be released May 2. As you might expect, the band is both recharged by this second wave of attention and getting uncomfortable. In the giant warehouse—which contains their rehearsal space, the office of the Ten Club fan Web site and countless reels of Pearl Jam recordings—they reluctantly shuffle into a back room for a rare photo shoot. They line up against a stark white wall in silence, like condemned prisoners awaiting the firing squad. You wonder why they want to put themselves through this again when Pearl Jam remains one of the most lucrative live acts around. In a word: politics. "There's a lot of anger and frustration in the atmosphere these days," says Vedder (who smokes way too much to have the voice he still has). "We didn't want to add to the negative noise pollution, but we did want to do something. It's just not the time to be cryptic. I mean, our tax dollars for this war are being funneled through huge corporations—one of which Dick Cheney used to be head of—and there's an even greater disparity between rich or poor in this country. It offends me on a really deep level." He smiles. "Then again, it makes me feel eternally young." Still, "Pearl Jam" is more than a screed against the Bush administration. It's a compelling rock-and-roll album that still shows the band's classic-rock roots, grunge's punk base and Vedder's political conviction: "There is a sickness, a sickness coming over me/Like watching freedom being sucked straight out to sea." Some of the best moments come when Vedder gives us an image rather than an idea. In "Un-employable," he describes a dented JESUS SAVES ring worn by a working-class guy who punched his metal locker when he got laid off. "Music's at its best when it has a purpose," says Vedder. "In the days of 'Rock Around the Clock' and 'Good Golly, Miss Molly,' the purpose was, like, 'We should be allowed to do this.' We certainly haven't had to go out of our way to find a purpose now." Not that they ever have, from their 1994 fight against Ticketmaster—in which guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament testified before the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful antitrust investigation —to their participation in the 2004 Vote for Change tour. Pearl Jam formed on the eve of the first gulf war. Vedder, then 24, was living in San Diego. He got ahold of a demo by Gossard, Ament and guitarist Mike McCready, then sent it back with his own vocals on top of their music. Seattle in those days was the place, where such underdog groups as Nirvana and Soundgarden were suddenly being signed to major labels. "There was a cultural element to our scene that had nothing to do with record labels," says drummer Matt Cameron, who played with Soundgarden before joining Pearl Jam in 1998. "It was a groundswell. These people appeared out of nowhere and sold millions and millions of records. It was a natural evolution, and I don't think anything like that has happened in rock since." But the scene was also self-destructive: rampant heroin use and an overall ethos that held that it was better to burn out than fade away. (Not an unfamiliar notion in rock and roll, but Seattle was deadly serious about it.) Pearl Jam is the only band left standing. "Stone and I made so many mistakes with our earlier band, Mother Love Bone," Ament recalls, "that basically concluded with Andy [Wood, their singer] dying. We were on a major label, and they were saying you gotta spend $300,000 to make a record, gotta have a supermixer mix it. After Andy died, we owed $40,000 to a lawyer and didn't have any money. I thought, If we get another opportunity, this is not how we're gonna do it. Luckily, the first Pearl Jam record blew up, and because the deal was on our terms, they had to let us continue making records that way. It really defined who we became." One thing they became, says Vedder, was apologetic. "Like, 'Sorry we're so popular.' 'Sorry, I like Mudhoney way better than us, too'." They tried to share the wealth by turning their audiences on to other people's music, touring with fringe bands and doing their own radio shows. Survivor guilt and noblesse oblige aren't such big issues anymore. Pearl Jam's rejection of rock stardom, their increasingly idiosyncratic records and Vedder's emerging role as an advocate for progressive causes have cost them casual fans; their last album sold one tenth of what their debut did. Does this worry Vedder? Guess. "If we can survive and play music and put out records and play live shows, and live our lives as family members, community members and friends—that's the goal. If we're able to do it within this industry, that's even better. It could even be a sign that the industry isn't too polluted." In other words, it's not about the money—though Vedder's idea of "surviving" may be your idea of filthy rich—and, ultimately, maybe not really about the politics. It's about the music, and few people describe better than Vedder the transcendent—and transitory—joy of artistic inspiration. "I think there's a finite beam when an idea happens," he says, "and if you don't translate it at that moment, it morphs into something less than the vision you had. What made it great gets dulled out. It might still be good, but that great beam of light hitting your brain—that's it. You just do brick-work while you wait for the beam to come." But leave it to Vedder to see the downside too. "For me, finishing this record was the biggest relief. My brain's like an iPod without earphones—the music's just in there, going, all the time. When the record was done I got to own my brain again. I've got a 21-month-old daughter, and I don't want this little girl growing up with an insane, mad-professor father. As romantic as it seems, I think she deserves better." Pearl Jam sometimes seems bent on renunciation: of fame, of money, and now, apparently, even of inconvenient bouts of inspiration. It's a shame they're so good. Must make life a lot tougher. © 2006 Newsweek, Inc. |
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Post by Paul on Apr 24, 2006 12:29:47 GMT -5
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