Sometimes people write about a band that seems ever-present even while their albums are sort of non-events sometimes people write about a band that seems to be lost out there in the ether, but is in reality a much more powerful force than you’d think and maybe, just maybe, is making better records than you’ve been led to expect. Some still stick to the idea that their first two or three records are their most focused and accomplished, and thus the only ones that really matter.
Nobody really claims the band’s most recent albums are their best, but there’s a pretty noticeable divergence amongst critics who dig their back-to-basics approach, and those who have yawned their way through the last three albums. Some entirely dismiss anything that happened roughly ’95-’02, some argue those mid-era Pearl Jam works are wrongfully sidelined in the ’90s alt-rock narrative. Every fan knows the experience of talking to someone who goes, “Oh, they’re still around? I remember that one song they did…” before said person breaks into some ridiculous impression of the chorus from “Jeremy.” (Or maybe that was just me and a high school gym teacher, but I’ve got to imagine this is a semi-frequent phenomenon.) And even with them now falling outside of a lot of people’s attention spans, they’re still a quantifiably “big” band, between their ease at selling out arenas and the fact that their albums still move a respectable amount of copies (especially for a rock band in 2013, even if the numbers pale in comparison to their commercial peak twenty years ago).Īll of this means that there’s a predictable rhythm to what critics will write upon the release of a new Pearl Jam album.
They entered the scene as one of the biggest bands in the world, and after a few years vanished from the mainstream audience radar, even though they continued, and still continue, to be an absolutely monolithic touring entity. Pearl Jam’s status as an artist can be a hard one to quantify.
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