ARMY RESERVE

How long must she stand
Before the ground, it gives way
To an endless fall
She can feel this
War on her face
Stars on her pillow
Folding in darkness
Begging for slumber

I'm not blind
I can see it coming
Looks like lightning
In my child's eye

I'm not frantic
I can feel it coming
Violently shakes
My body

Her son's slanted
Always giving her
The sideways eye
An empty chair where dad sits
How loud can silence get?
And mom, she reassures
To contain him
But it's becoming a lie

She tells herself
And everyone else
Father is risking
His life for our freedoms

I'm not blind
I can see it coming
Looks like lightning
In my childs eye

I'm not frantic
I can feel it coming
Darling you'll save me
If you save yourself

I’m a huge fan of Pearl Jam’s self-titled album. This is despite the fact that it has flaws that we are reminded of on a regular basis. It’s an aggressive album, both in song styling and production. At times this doesn’t serve the intimacy of the lyrical content, but the goals of the album were ambitious in a way that they have not attempted since No Code, and, to many long-time fans, there is a feeling that they did not succeed in this endeavor. For me, this album was my gateway to the band, and remains my favorite.

The lyric writing throughout the album is markedly more cohesive and mature than on any other album as a whole. The ideas and imagery meld deftly with the poetic cadence and meter, which is in turn fully integrated into the structure of the music. In every song except ARMY RESERVE and INSIDE JOB the poetic meter and strong melodies drive the songs forward, a marked contrast to the goals of previous rockers such as INSIGNIFICANCE and GRIEVANCE, which are percussion driven.

ARMY RESERVE is the exception here. The bass melody with its characteristic rhythm pattern anchors the entire song, especially the long, sustained vocal lines. The relentlessness of it coupled with the churning rhythm guitar figure is what gives ARMY RESERVE its feeling of grim resignation, fitting for the subject matter and the intimacy of the images.

An empty chair where dad sits
How loud can silence get?

The high lead guitar lines lighten the mood a bit, but only a bit, only to become just as relentless in the outro following the lines:

I'm not frantic
I can feel it coming
Darling you'll save me
If you save yourself

Whether the soldier in this family dies is, in my opinion, left ambiguous. Some take the mood of resignation to mean that the soldier has died, and that in COME BACK his wife is mourning for him. I choose to believe that the dead soldier in WWS is not necessarily the father in this family and that there is still the possibility that he will return.

3 stars

The lyrics are pretty good on this one, but the music isn't good at all IMO. I've never understood the love for this track.

Not bad, but not one of my favs on Avocado.

3 stars.

I adore this track. Easily the best thing on the record, IMO.

The music, especially the echoing guitar and thumping bass, remind me of sitting in a cornfield in South Dakota watching the most incredible, foreboding wall cloud I've ever seen coming in, lightning snapping like weird appendages searching for something on the ground below. The song doesn't sound endangered or ominous, it just sounds like the face of something that is going to happen.

3 stars for me.

I love the closing lines...they linger in the head and resolve with Come Back.

I feel the song on the whole is pretty strong - the lyrics are felt, and the verses feel like new territory for PJ. The vocal melodies/harmonies on the chorus are well executed (even live!), but i do feel that the choruses aren't as great as the verses. I'm not quite sure what it's lacking...maybe a little more of a soaring lead line? I can't articulate it, but it just feels like a prechorus to me.

My main concern with Army Reserve though, is how the outro meanders fairly aimlessly. The song just doesn't really end. I can see a couple of reasons why this might be the case...

Firstly, it could be a creative decision to reflect the feelings of the mother and son in these times: the painful wait for something to happen...as mentioned earlier - the sentiment of the last line is left to linger in the air, unanswered and unresolved.
Secondly, it could be band lazyness. Jeff rarely writes more than three musical parts to his compositions, and this one is no exception. He's also really proud of his bass part and doesn't want us to forget it, so he tells the band to just keep repeating it, and they'll fade it out like those cool bands do when they jam shit out. Plus, Mike likes making cool guitar noises.

the intro is cool, but that's about it. 2 stars

also on the few 06 bootlegs i've heard, this song always stands out. this is the only S/T track i hope to hear next month.

[quote="McParadigm"]I adore this track. Easily the best thing on the record, IMO.

one of my favourites off the 'cado actually
4 star

This is a song that I liked a lot more when I first heard it than the last time it came up on shuffle. I feel like it has all the elements necessary for it to be great, but it just isn't. In 2006, it seemed like war protests needed to be a lot more blunt because people were just beginning to wake up and realize how much of a permanent clusterfuck Iraq was (see Neil Young's Living With War), but now I just find the complete lack of subtlety a little embarrassing.

3 stars.

I don't find any of the specificity required to create such a blunt and direct stance in this song. Neil's Living With War is pretty damn zeroed in on its target...this song is not. How many of the last 50 years has America not been involved in military action? And in how many of those cases would this song pretty well fit as a storyline?

It's like a good anti-war movie. Deer Hunter Theory, you know...make the characters powerful enough and it'll last forever.

I agree with McP on this. Sometimes too much specificity can rob an idea of its power, or an intimate setting of the emotion of the scene. I don't find these lyrics either lacking in subtlety or embarrassing.

This poem by Siefried Sassoon, retains its power after 90 years despite it's childlike construction.

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

i really really love this song. musically, everything's in its right place - there's a cool yet menacing depth to the arrangements and the backing vocals in the choruses are something i haven't heard done effectively in PJ since the bridge in In My Tree; i love those. the lyrics are pretty straightforward but still, it's a topical song and i think Ed nails the situation pretty neatly.
if there's a song on Avocado that could possibly point a musical way forward for this band, it's this one.
5*

I wonder about the band laziness on this one also. Ed talked about how the sessions on Avocado were so stressful to him--that the album took so much out of everyone and the decision making process was strenuous. That level of strain and this track just don't match up. There's so much potential, but it just doesn't have the roundness of a track like "Severed Hand" from beginning to end.

I don't think the band did this on purpose. It's moments like this on Avocado where I lost some respect for the band. They obviously wanted a big album front to back that would please die hards and gain some re-respect from the mainstream, but (as time has shown) did not accomplish this.

That being said, I still gave it 4 stars because live it really shined. The verses are beautiful and haunting, and the vocals kick ass. But because of it's weak song structure, I bet this one doesn't see the light of day in a live setting much if at all.

i liked this one a lot when the album first came out
it hasn't stuck with me though like some of the others
i like it, but i never purposley put it on


i have a friend who thinks the music itself sounds like the cure

3.5 stars

if this song lacks subtlety, what do you have to say about WWS then ?

This song has been in my head for the last few days. I really enjoy the groove of the song and, as has been said in this thread, has great open lyrics by Ed which could be used for any conflict.

I would like Pearl Jam to write more loose grooves like this one. It allows for more organic explosions.

This song fit the groove mood of Gorge II perfectly and I was so pleased to hear Ed get up to its difficult parts. Not perfect but a 4 from me.

I like the music. The guitar strum with that heavy bass is real cool. I don't want Jeff to write sons, but the more I hear him in songs, the better. I like interesting and audible bass lines.

The lyrics are nice and I like the story, but I hate how Ed sings this song. If this was the way he sang all the time, I either wouldn't mind or I wouldn't be a PJ fan...but the fact he is purposely straining and had that gurgly, scratchy straining vocals...It bothers me.

3 stars.

Nice write up SLH

I remember on my first listen thinking this one had a lot of potnetial, as a few of the lyrics really grabbed me. I still think, verse wise, this is a very well written anti-war song, becuase it has a lot of subtelty to it (so I guess I'm not with pd on this one). It's not an open condemnation per se, but instead looking at the affects war has on families and the people left behind. you don't get that nearly as much. And there are some really affecting lyrics in here. The first verse in particular (except for the 'she can feel this war on her face') is powerful, and I really love the sense of confusion and impending dread and doom in the second. I especially love the 'she tells herself and everyone else...' lyric. It says so much so concisely--the way in which military families are forced to believe that their loved ones are fighting for something worthwhile to justify the sacrfice, even while they know they don't really believe it.

Not a fan of the chorus--as someone said earlier in the thread, I like the way the last lyric lingers, but overall this is a little to heavy handed and immediate and lacks the depth of the verses, and is a bit too sharp a contrast.

Eddie's vocals are good, but not great. I love the music until the outro, which, as was also mentioned, kind of meanders on forever without any real purpose, tension, or climax.

it's a 3 star song, but it could have been 4 with either a slightly better chorus or tighter outro.