Pearl Jam – Gigaton (Universal/Republic/Monkeywrench)

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They’re still around! Pearl Jam present us with their first album since 2013’s Lightning Bolt. Gigaton is an album that rocks remarkably hard for a group that’s been together for thirty years.

Yes, it’s been three decades years since Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready got together (drummer Matt Cameron joined in 1998). Things sure have changed in that time.

After releasing their debut album, 10, in 1991, Pearl Jam immediately became huge…second only to Nirvana as part of the Seattle “grunge” explosion that included Alice In Chains and Soundgarden.  But Pearl Jam were always different than their peers. Sure, 10’s songs focused on depression, suicide and loneliness, which made them seem like a natural fit into the grunge scene. But those topics soon fell by the wayside with Vedder and his compatriots taking on more political subject matter.

Also, musically, the band was always more conventional in a “classic rock” sort of way than the doomy sludge of Alice In Chains or Soundgarden. At one point Kurt Cobain called the group out for having too many guitar solos and not sounding “alternative” enough.

Kurt was right, and 30 years later, Gigaton bears that out. Its just that in 2020, that’s not a bad thing.

The album opens with Who Ever Said, a fierce rocker that has more in common with The Who or Led Zeppelin, than Nirvana.

But, despite a few musical sidelines over the years, that seems to be who Pearl Jam are. And these days I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Sure, there are guitar solos up the ying-yang on Gigaton, but there are also impassioned vocal performances from Vedder, sounding slightly more growly than his early days, along with a veteran band that clearly still loves to play together.

Eddie tosses in a few barbs at Trump to keep things contemporary. In Who Ever Said he sings about “sideways talk, poisoning our thoughts”. More directly on Quick Escape we hear, “Crossed the border to Morocco, Kashmir then Marrakech, the lengths we had to go then, to find a place Trump hadn’t fucked up yet”. You’ll also hear a sly nod to Freddie Mercury.

Fortunately there’s little preaching and much more rocking on Gigaton, although it begins to mellow out at the end beginning with track 10, Come Then Goes, which finds Vedder’s voice accompanied by just an acoustic guitar.

There’s nothing on here as strong as the high-points on 10 or Vs. but its good to know these guys are still around, they still care and they still rock.

Marty Duda

 

Marty Duda
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