Post subject: Eddie Q&A in Rolling Stone / Album Review
Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2006 3:31 pm
Banned from the Pit
Joined: Fri Jun 17, 2005 7:40 pm Posts: 25
The new RS with W on the cover sports a 4 star review of the new album by David Fricke - and a Q&A with Eddie by Austin Scaggs.
In the Q&A Ed discusses the album, learning guitar, meeting Bob Dylan, crowd surfing vs. surfing, his love of the Kings Of Leon and The Strokes, and how he wrote Elderly Woman...
They also ask him a couple of things about music in general...
First album: Got To Be There - Michael Jackson
Last Album: Joe Strummer and 101ers - Quasi - and The Evens..."I get em all at Easy Street in Seattle."
Record Spun the Most: The Who until he discovered Fugazi - since then 13 songs
Best Song I've Ever Written: Matt Cameron says 'Thumbing my Way" was the nicest chord progression I've ever devised.
Last edited by Future Laid To Waste on Wed Apr 19, 2006 4:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Wartime, for everything else that's wrong with it, brings out the best in Pearl Jam: the power-chord brawn, contrary righteousness and metallic-KO songwriting sense. The band's second and third albums, 1993's bluntly titled Vs. and 1994"s Vitalogy are as good as modern rock-in-opposition gets: shotgun guitars, incendiary bass and drums, and Eddie Vedder's scalded-dog howl, all discharged in backs-to-the-wall- fury and union. This album, Pearl Jam's first studio release in four years and their best in ten, is more of that top electric combat.
With a difference. The Pearl Jam on Pearl Jam is not the band that famously responded to overnight platibum by going to war with the world. Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron are now fully at war in the world, unrepenetant veterans of the campaign trail and right-wing crucifixion who have made the most overtly partisan - and hopeful - record of their lives. For Vedder, the 2004 election was not a total loss. "Why swim the channel just to get this far?/Halfway there why would you turn around? he demands in the first song, Life Wasted, in a ragged, run-on bark. And it's all forward ho from there. As immediate and despairing as breaking news from Baghdad - World Wide Suicide opens with a newspaper casualty report - Pearl Jam is also as big and brash in fuzz and backbone as Led Zeppelin's Presence.
That's not just rock critic shorthand. However you define grunge music, Pearl Jam didn't play it. They were, from jump street, a classic rock band, building their bawl with iron-guitar bones and an arena vocal lust that came right from Zeppelin, early-seventies Who and mid-Eighties U2 (with distortion instead of The Edge's glass-guitar harmonics.) But Pearl Jam have not been this consistently dirty and determined in the studio since they subbed for Crazy Horse on Neil Young's 1995 Mirror Ball. I own two compelte tours worth of Pearl Jam's official bootleg series, and this record's five song blast off (Life Wasted, WWS, Comatose, Severed Hand, Marker In The Sand) is right up there in punch and crust with my favorite nights in that live series (Seattle 11/6/00 and New Orleans 4/8/03, to name two.) And whenever the guitars take over, which is alot - Gossard and McCready's slugging ACDC like intro to Life Wasted, McCready's wild wah-wah ride in Big Wave, the way he cracks Vedder's gloom in Parachutes like heat lighting - it reminds me that Gossard and McCready deserved to be on our 2003 "Greatest Guitarists" list. Permit me to admit it here: I screwed up.
That's more confession than you'll ever hear out of the Bush White House. But the talk-show pit bulls will be dissapointed to find that Vedder doesn't waste his breath naming names here, except for glancing reference to "the president" in WWS. There is blame, but it's spread all around. "Now you got both sides/Claiming Killing In God's name/ But God is nowhere to be found. conveniently" Vedder sings on Marker In The Sand, from inside Gossard and McCready's crossfire saturation bombing of Ament and Cameron. There is dreed too - lots of it. "Army Reserve" is a midtemp elegy for the real Army Reserve, the wives and children who serve in worry, behind the lines. (The dark vocal harmonies crowding Vedder's low, grainy vocal feel like ghosts in waiting.) And "Unemployable" is just half a story, with a soaring-melancholy chorus. The song ends before the guy with the pink slip can find a new job. But Vedder's opening scene - the fist with the big gold ring that saves JESUS SAVES, flying with helpless anger into a metal locker - is lesson enough. In multinational capitialism run riot, the bottom line doesn't care about religion or party line. We're all expendable.
And we're all accountable. The politics on Pearl Jam are not those of right or left but of engagement and responsibility. In Life Wasted Vedder at least partly mocks his old self, the one that wore success and leverage that came with it like sackcloth: "Darkness comes in waves, tell me/Why invite it to stay?" But there is only determined optimism in Pearl Jam's superb finish, "Inside Job." The song starts quietly, then climbs and peaks like a combination of "Stairway To Heaven, and The Who's "The Song Is Over" - a mirror image of Vedder's stumble through each line from night into light. "I will not lose my faith" he promises under thunderclap guitars, with such assurance that even if you don't agree with anything else on the record, you believe him.
THEN UNDER KEY TRACKS FROM THIS ISSUE'S REVIEWS:
WORLD WIDE SUICIDE - Who cares if the world is going down the toilet? Eddie Vedder got his mojo back!
Last edited by Future Laid To Waste on Wed Apr 19, 2006 4:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Users browsing this forum: 10Club Management and 7 guests
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot post attachments in this forum
