This guy is a quality reviewer.

Vital Vedder's not ready to be put out to pasture

By CHUCK CAMPBELL
Scripps Howard News Service
01-MAY-06

"PEARL JAM," Pearl Jam (J)

After Pearl Jam's 1991 release "Ten" sold nearly 10 million copies in the United States alone, the group inexplicably was fast-forwarded to the ranks of exalted acts whose songwriting skills are faltering. With these bands it's all about the live shows, not the new music.

While the Rolling Stones may be content to go through the motions in the studio as an obligatory pre-tour ritual, Pearl Jam has continued making vibrant albums in the decade and a half since "Ten." And fans who are planning to bypass "Pearl Jam" on their way to see the band's upcoming North American tour are doing the group a disservice.

Sure, Pearl Jam is no longer engineering a wave of innovative rock the way the group did in the early 1990s with fellow Seattle bands Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. And "Pearl Jam" listeners will have to take their medicine with a few overly dour moments on the part of singer Eddie Vedder, who's still really steamed at President Bush _ just as he was on 2002's "Riot Act."

But Pearl Jam is kicking with refreshingly unpretentious and raw energy as guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready help ignite the quavering baritone of Vedder, who's now 41 years old and more focused than ever.

The intensity of "Pearl Jam" is often downright punk _ anti-establishment, old-school punk, not the cutesy, winking-at-the-girls tripe that now passes as punk. The tattered first single "World Wide Suicide" captures the internal anxious fire that burns in any rational soul these days, and that intensity carries through with urgent desperation on the nearly fractured "Life Wasted" and the nearly discordant "Comatose."

The group members also are as experimental as ever on "Pearl Jam," only now they're bringing it together in a more congruent fashion than they did on the past several releases. The harnessed rhythm and feverish guitars of "Severed Hand" shift naturally to the frantic, irregular beat of "Marker in the Sand," which in turn transpires into an uneasy lullaby, "Parachutes."

Meanwhile, psychedelia washes over "Big Wave" and the epic closer "Inside Job," and surrealism marks the love song "Come Back," a near-liturgical mix of soul and blues, and "Army Reserve," which finds the instrumentalists in subdued mode as Vedder delivers one of his most wrenching studio performances to date.

The sales may not be what they should, but Pearl Jam continues to reinforce its position as one of the most relevant American bands in the past 20 years.

Rating (five possible): 4