Pearl Jam – Backspacer: 35 minutes of ear pleasure

Pearl Jam – Backspacer: 35 minutes of ear pleasure

It is not common for bands to release one of their best albums almost 20 years into their career but Pearl Jam has just done that with Backspacer.  This is the point when bands release songs that give you time to take a piss when you see them live.  But before I reviewBackspacer, I need to rewind.

I’m an interesting Pearl Jam fan.

Most Pearl Jam fans were drawn into the Vedder web with Ten and site this album as their masterwork.   Not me.  I heard this album about 10,000 times in college since it seemed to be fused to every friend’s 6 disc player and would either be played in full or come up in shuffle  during beer drenched parties.  Unlike the rest of planet Earth, the whole Seattle explosion didn’t really impress me at first and although I dug “Evenflow” I loathed “Jeremy” and Vedder’s mumbling style in general.

I didn’t start appreciating Pearl Jam until their second album Vs. One of the main reasons was that the songs were tighter, more upbeat, and the production by Brenden O’Brian was incredible .  You could play this album from start to finish and there was not one stinker in the bunch.

Vitalogy?  No Code? Not so much.  These albums made my appreciation for Pearl Jam dissipate and I soon wrote them off for over a decade.  The way you could sum up their output over that time period was simple.

It was fucking boring.

The rest of the world seemed to follow my lead.  Their album sales dwindled and they released about 1,000 live albums and the trilogy of turds Yield, Binaural,  Riot Act, to a smaller but dedicated following.   At least I assumed they were turds.  I never heard them.  I was completely wrong about one of them:  Yield. More about that later.

In 2006 Pearl Jam released a new album creatively titled Pearl Jamand featured an avocado on the cover that looked scrumptious.  This album was decent but not great.  It was decent enough for me to see them live the same year at Summerfest in Milwaukee and download a couple of concerts from their website.

Boom.  I was now a huge fan.  There was a ton of live material that I didn’t recognize but were now some of my favorite Pearl Jam songs.  It turned out that all this “new” material was on Yield. This album could’ve been called Vs. Part Duex except that album title would’ve been almost as stupid as Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.

Well, the point of telling you all this crap is that Backspacer is Vs. Part 3 and proves the value of having a great producer since Brendan O’ Brian is back again.  At just over 35 minutes, it gets the job done without meandering (like this review) and is the most “fun” album Pearl Jam has ever released.  “Fixer”, “Get Some”, “Supersonic” are great and Vedder and Co. does their best ballad since “Black” with “Just Breathe.”  The track sequencing is perfect as it starts off with a boom, slows down in the middle and sprints to the finish line.  If I was doing an infomercial like that hooker-punching doofus on the Sham Wow! commercials I would say this:

“If you liked Vs. and Yieldyou’re going to love Backspacer!”

If you’re looking for Ten, you’re not going to find it.  But if you want a rock album with tons of energy that’s just long enough to listen to in entirety on your commute, pick this up.  I suggest getting the physical copy exclusively at Target because the artwork and packaging is also cool.

Pearl Jam – Backspacer: 35 minutes of ear pleasure