http://www.xpressmag.com.au/archives/20 ... _vedde.php

PEARL JAM - Vedder Than Ever

Pearl Jam burst back on the scene this week with their self-titled album. SEAN SENNETT reports.

Ed Vedder got it right when he recently described Pearl Jam as 'an old car with a new engine'. The new engine is the band's eighth-studio album, simply titled Pearl Jam. In New York City for a series of press commitments, guitarist and rock n' roll renaissance man Stone Gossard agrees with the sentiment.

"That's a great way of thinking about it," he confirms. "It feels like we're having an energy shift. Things are very positive right now. I think we're all looking back on the records we've made and the time we've spent together, and we're feeling optimistic. We still believe in being in a band and hanging out with your buddies. It all feels like the right place to be right now… that's for sure."

The ensuing weeks will include appearances on everything from Saturday Night Live to Later With Jools. They'll play London for the first time in six years, while the single, World Wide Suicide, is popping up on rock and alternative radio play lists all over the planet.

The album, released on Tuesday, May 2, doesn't pull punches. There's an immediacy in the playing that evokes the energy of a band cutting their second or third album.

"Yeah, it's up-tempo," enthuses Gossard. "That's a classic word to use if you're an old guy, 'up-tempo'. It's a heavy record. It sounds aggressive. The first four or five tracks are pretty slammin'. Sometimes it feels good to play slow, sad blues and some swing, but this feels like a good time to be playing rock music."

Recorded at Seattle's Studio X, the band enlisted the help of an old ally, Adam Casper, for production duties. Casper engineered the band's last studio effort, Riot Act in 2002. "He's worked with Foo Fighters before, and Queens Of The Stone Age," continues Gossard.

"He's an old friend. We've all made a lot of records and have opinions about how things should go, but a producer's job is to get everybody through that process… and to help steer it. By engineering it and sitting in the producer's chair he did a lot of work on this record."

The band worked extensively on demos prior to recording. They were quite happy to watch deadlines come and go in an effort to make a superior album.

"We rehearsed for a week and we worked up seven or eight things," explains Gossard. "Everyone had at least three or four new ideas lying out the back. We started cutting demos over the course of a couple of weeks and then we'd leave it a couple of weeks and maybe come back in a month and cut a couple more. Sometimes we'd re-do a tune we already did. We just repeated the process until we kept coming back to the songs we liked. We were like, 'if it isn't broken, let's keep it'.

"We don't worry about the deadlines, we trust the process and go another session if we have to and see what happens. Ed would take the songs away and work on his poetry until it felt right. That can be time consuming, but when you hear the results of his hard work you can tell he put a lot into it.

"We took more time on it than any record we've ever made. I think that's why it turned out as good as it did. We tend to, and this is my own personal opinion, to get 12 or 13 songs and say 'well this is us'. Which, in the past, has taken us a long ways towards not being self-conscious about our process.

"On this record we finished three or four songs that wouldn't have happened if we'd done what we'd normally done and closed early. Comatose got written right at the end of the record and so did Big Wave. Inside Job came late too. We took our time and it worked out."

At the heart of Pearl Jam remains a strong social conscience and a voice that's ready to shine a light on political shortcomings. The titles say a lot; Life Wasted, Wasted Reprise, Army Reserve and Gone provide a clue to Mr. Vedder's current thought process. The last time Pearl Jam toured Australia, Eddie quite happily spiked a George Bush mask on his mic stand. Things haven't changed.

"There's some cohesion in the types of characters and situations that Ed's talking about," continues Gossard, "and obviously there's some overt political commentary. There's also stories about people on it, and people in difficult situations. The reason they're good lyrics is they have a universal quality to them that you can relate to a lot of different things. Sometimes the things, like wars and politics, are actually happening now.

"That's my guess," he adds. "I only just got the lyric sheet. I have to interpret Ed's lyrics. I can hear something 10 years from now and think it's about something else."

The power of Pearl Jam is that incendiary combination of Vedder's voice and the band's commitment to rock the studio, the concert hall and anywhere else they can lay their hands on electricity. "A good song is always going to be a combination things," Gossard confirms, "You gotta have something you can dance to."
Posted on April 26, 2006 07:40 PM

thanks I just put this up, but I don't think I've ever seen a review talk less about the actual music.

Obviously you don't read pitchforkmedia.com

ah, touche

that was more of an interview than a review, i'd say.

wait, comatose was written at the end of the record??

its good to know that its not just us who have to interpret ed's lyrics...

That's because it's an interview

Yeah, sorry. It came across as a review until I actually read it.

Still it's at least better than the NME review

well it's okay. I like the idea of keeping all this stuff together in one place anyway, even if it is an interview

Yeah, me too. Keep up the good work stip.