How Dark Matter Ranks in the Pearl Jam Catalog
Inside the band’s new album and what it says about them in 2024
Jeremy’s voice lowered, a little conspiratorially and a little nonchalantly, as he told us that Eddie Vedder sometimes hung out at the Cat’s Eye Café.
It was a little place near the north edge of our neighborhood park which, like so many unpolished gems from that era in Seattle, has been gone for a long time now.
We understood the implication, that this was privileged information but also no big deal. We remembered the stories in magazines about Vedder going so far as to wear a weird mask out in public to avoid being recognized, and witnessed how the spotlight had burned our city’s other major stars, so we weren’t about to become coffee-camping high school kids in the corner of Cat’s Eye waiting for him to walk in the door. Pearl Jam were one of our own, and they were to be protected.
The band themselves also had a sense, practically from the start, that what they had needed to be protected. Their first defining decision, when their public profile was at its peak only a couple years into a career that is now described in decades, was to take a step back from that peak. Yes, it was their privilege to be in a position to stop feeding MTV and still be able to sell millions of CDs, but there was still a bottom line and potential blowback to consider. That urge to defend what they had extended to their fans with their second defining decision, when they took on Ticketmaster as five musicians against one monopoly. That they ultimately didn’t win the war doesn’t mean they were wrong to fight it. The classic photo of bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard raising their right hands at that notorious Congressional hearing captures the moment Pearl Jam began to hold meaning beyond music.
VIDEO: Pearl Jam Twenty trailer
Loads of bands get anniversary write-ups these days, but very few have received them in the form of a lavishly illustrated hardcover book put out by a major publisher to accompany a documentary film.
“A Pearl Jam concert today is about much more than music,” Cameron Crowe writes in the foreword to Pearl Jam Twenty. “It’s about the kind of clear-eyed spirit that comes from believing in people and music and its power to change a shitty day into a great one, or looking at an injustice and feeling less alone about facing it.”
Crowe’s observation is both on-brand romantic exaggeration and also abstractly true. It highlights the fact that the band were huge enough to become a vessel that fans could pour all of their ideas into.
Pearl Jam were one of the Big Four pillars of the Northwest music scene’s commercial breakthrough in the early ‘90s, but the passage of time has carved them a path more aligned with another one of the city’s survivors, Mudhoney, rather than the tragic routes and premature endings met by Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. Given the shared history between the two groups, from the seed-sowing proto-grunge of Green River, to Mudhoney repeatedly opening for Pearl Jam over the years, the similarity isn’t all that surprising.
“I didn’t reap the same level of financial rewards that my friends in Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden ultimately did…” admits Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner in his memoir Mud Ride. “By 1993, I was in a unique position, in that I could experience a lot of the highs without all the intense scrutiny.”
One might assume that Turner and vocalist Mark Arm were looking on with major envy as their former bandmates Jeff and Stone collected platinum records, but “a lot of the highs without all the intense scrutiny” sounds kind of like what Pearl Jam began slowly working toward as early as, well, 1993. Maybe envy was flowing evenly in the other direction.
There’s also a sonic thread that reduces their distance with each new record, in the way that Pearl Jam have settled into their own version of a straight-ahead rock sound. Sure, there are still ballads like “Sirens” from Lightning Bolt and lighter moments like “Just Breathe” from Backspacer, but their last four studio albums all take the first three or four songs to blow off steam, and Dark Matter establishes itself in much the same way.
“Scared of Fear” races into “React, Respond” carrying a torch for the past into a burning future, and you almost forget that these guys haven’t really had anything to prove to anyone but themselves in a long time. They veer into a “Daughter”-esque tempo with “Wreckage” and its hard to hear those breezy first chords and not feel like you’re in vintage territory, and then the title track stomps in fiery and focused, cryptic and direct.
Dark Matter, which was produced by lifelong PJ fan Andrew Watt, is a very, very good album. It’s easy to imagine older listeners who drifted away after Binaural and newcomers alike tuning in to it. Don’t be surprised if in the next few months someone you know shares an opinion to the effect of, “Hey, have you heard the new Pearl Jam? It’s actually pretty great.”
VIDEO: Pearl Jam “Wreckage”
The band sounds unburdened by their own unavoidable context while also content with it. There are subtle surprises, like how the chorus of “Running” could have come from The Jam’s Setting Sons, a less obvious Mod influence than Vedder favorites The Who (and surely it’s just a coincidence that the final track is called “Setting Sun”). There are also familiar warm embraces like “Waiting for Stevie,” which soars somewhere between “I Got Id” and “Given to Fly.”
Classic rock lineage welcomed and weighed in on Pearl Jam after Ten immediately put them in that conversation. They appeared to be as comfortable befriending their childhood heroes as they were uncomfortable dealing with the industry that made it possible for them to meet. Neil Young and Pete Townshend were their musical peers more than many bands of their own generation. Somewhere along the line they found a level of fame without celebrity in which they have thrived.
Being a band with a history suits them well. They were right to protect what they had.
- How Dark Matter Ranks in the Pearl Jam Catalog - April 24, 2024
- Future Boys: Catherine Wheel’s Adam and Eve at 25 - July 30, 2022
- Cosmopolitan Blood Loss: Glassjaw’s Worship & Tribute At 20 - July 20, 2022
You May Also Like
-
February 13, 2024 -
January 14, 2020 -
August 29, 2021
