Pearl Jam

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Essential Albums

  • Vitalogy
    Vitalogy
    Vitalogy

    Released at the end of 1994, the year of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Vitalogy can be heard in part as a tribute to the fallen Nirvana singer. “Last Exit,” “Not For You” and “Immortality” all could be read arguably as Pearl Jam acknowledging his difficult life and all are among the album’s most affecting tunes. In any case, this is emotionally charged music — rawer than their previous releases — split between charged rockers (“Spin the Black Circle,” “Tremor Christ,” “Corduroy”) that continue to highlight the group’s live performances, and bizarre, experimental pieces that find the group challenging its audience (the accordion-based “Bugs,” the bargain-basement funk “Aye Davanita,” the music concrete “Hey Foxymophandlemama, That’s Me”). It’s here the group come closest to the punk ends of their roots. Vedder has less of the messianic urge in his vocals and the guitarists mostly eschew classic rock guitar solos and influences for a raw, brittle sound. Throw in “Nothingman” and “Better Man,” two more of the group’s champion brooders, and Vitalogy is nothing short of a full-spectrum look at a modern hard rock group growing up.

  • Vs.
    Vs.
    Vs.

    Decades after the fact, it's easy to forget that in grunge's heyday, Pearl Jam were even bigger than Nirvana. Though Kurt Cobain became the scene's icon (especially in death), Pearl Jam commanded the attention of an even wider swath of America. And their second album, Vs., marks the moment where the band proved that both they and the movement they spearheaded had the legs to move forward and evolve. In the wake of their debut's record-breaking success and resultant overexposure, Pearl Jam tried to avoid making another blockbuster. Vs. is less polished and anthemic than Ten; the songs are more idiosyncratic, and the band declined to make music videos for the singles. The core elements of the sound that made Pearl Jam superstars are still evident here—the big, blazing riffs on tunes like "Blood" and "Animal," and Vedder's leonine roar throughout most of the album. But the band were branching out into new directions, too. The syncopated grooves of "Rats" and "W.M.A." show the grunge gods could be funky when they wanted to. "Glorified G" mates its anti-gun message with a rather R.E.M.-ish, much poppier feel. Perhaps most significantly, a good chunk of Vs. explores a quieter, more melodic side, as heard on the ghostly, nearly ambient "Indifference," the lyrically and sonically small-scale character study "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town," and the hooky, acoustic-strumming "Daughter," which became the album's biggest hit. But when they let loose on the rockers, they reminded the world of the fury and abandon that made them heroes in the first place.

  • Ten
    Ten
    Ten

    That Pearl Jam originally named themselves after the NBA player Mookie Blaylock makes a poetic kind of sense: Of all the bands to come out of the alternative-rock boom in the early ’90s, none felt so deeply connected to sports as they did—their focus, their fluidity, their kinetic energy and positive release. For as dark as the material on Ten is—portraits of homelessness (“Even Flow”) and mental illness (“Why Go”), family dysfunction (“Alive”) and teenage alienation elevated to physical violence (“Jeremy”)—the overall spirit of their 1991 debut is one of brightness and vitality, of rising above. As the story goes, singer Eddie Vedder—a gas station attendant in San Diego who’d never met his bandmates before joining them in Seattle—came up with his first round of lyrics for their demo tape while he was out surfing, his feet still covered in sand as he laid down vocals. Where decades of pop culture had split notions of male identity into macho and sensitive, jocks and nerds, Pearl Jam, in their own unwitting way, brought them together: Here were five very earnest young guys, desperate to take you above the rim. And for all the stereotypes of Seattle rock as grungy and monochromatic, Ten (its title a tribute to Blaylock’s jersey number) has a broad palette: syncopated hard rock (“Once”), fragile ballads (“Black”), Hendrix-indebted psychedelia (“Deep”). Where Kurt Cobain ironized conventional guitar solos by purposefully screwing his up, Mike McCready plays with the passion and enthusiasm of someone who still believes in them—a distinction that not only kept continuity with classic rock, but made Pearl Jam more akin to Guns N’ Roses and Metallica than, say, the Melvins. And while his subject matter was intimate, Vedder never sang like he belonged anywhere smaller than an arena, creating a prototype for basically every famous rock vocalist in his wake. He later worried it was all too much—too open, too personal, too vulnerable. But the lack of emotional distance is part of what makes Ten so distinct. Prior to Vedder joining the band, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had played in Mother Love Bone alongside vocalist Andy Wood, who died of a drug overdose in 1990. They were looking for a new beginning; Vedder was looking for a chance. Standing onstage at the Pinkpop festival two years later, in the summer of 1992, around the time that Ten was certified gold, Vedder, gasping for air, turns his Polaroid camera on a crowd in the tens of thousands. He’d later tell an interviewer backstage that it was overwhelming to look out at such a sea of people—as if, in disbelief, he’d needed those pictures as proof that it had really happened. At a moment when mainstream rock was in upheaval, Pearl Jam’s real rebellion was to live.

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About Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam is a band born from death. Rising from the ashes of Seattle hard-rock hopefuls Mother Love Bone—whose flamboyant frontman, Andrew Wood, succumbed to an overdose in 1990—guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament built their next group around singer Eddie Vedder, a California-based gas-station attendant with whom they had become demo-trading penpals through their mutual friend Jack Irons (formerly of the Red Hot Chili Peppers). After the Wood tribute project Temple of the Dog effectively served as Vedder’s public audition, Pearl Jam’s 1991 debut, Ten—alongside Nirvana’s Nevermind, released a month later—transformed the grungy sound of Seatte’s underground into a global phenomenon. But while Ten teemed with dark tales of intra-family trauma (“Alive”) and classroom suicide (“Jeremy”), its songs were fueled by a classic rock-schooled sense of cathartic release, positioning Pearl Jam as the idealistic Clash to Nirvana’s nihilistic Sex Pistols. With 1993’s equally furious Vs., Pearl Jam became the most popular rock band in America, spending five weeks at No. 1 and setting a record for opening-week sales. But in hindsight, that album—and the media hysteria surrounding the group at the time—marked the beginning of Pearl Jam’s long, slow retreat from the spotlight, en route to becoming either the world’s biggest cult band or its cultiest arena act. Forsaking traditional promotional strategies like music videos, Pearl Jam swapped their grunge sound for more enigmatic, experimental efforts like 1996’s Vitalogy and 2000’s Binaural, while devoting their energies to battling Ticketmaster in court over monopolistic practices and throwing their weight behind various social-justice causes. Throughout it all, the band has continued to stage legendarily sprawling live shows for massive crowds of Deadhead-like devotees, while maturing gracefully on record—once the embodiment of rage and discontent, Vedder’s sonorous voice is a kindly source of comfort on latter-day acoustic turns like 2009’s “Just Breathe” and 2013’s “Sirens.” But coming off a seven-year hiatus, 2020’s Gigaton relit the band’s adventurous impulses with forays into Talking Heads-style funk (“Dance of the Clairvoyants”) and psychedelic folk (“Buckle Up”)—a heartening indicator that, despite being an American rock institution, Pearl Jam’s nonconformist streak is still very much alive.

ORIGIN
Seattle, WA, United States
FORMED
1990
GENRE
Rock

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