Pearl Jam
Binaural
»
Pearl Jam
Binaural
Epic, 2000
RiYL: Fugazi, The Police's Outlandos D'Amour, Patti Smith, X |
Perhaps this is what pushes the woman on to the ledge of a building on the opening track of Pearl Jam's powerful sixth album, Binaural. Even though "all the love that she had is just wood that she burned," as singer Eddie Vedder tells us, she should take comfort: she's not alone.
Binaural is filled to the brim with desperate souls who have lost their basic connection with humankind, with people that can no longer communicate with one another: a lover mourning a soulmate ("Light Years"), a guy who thinks money is the key to happiness ("Soon Forget"), and another adrift in his own dream world ("Sleight Of Hand").
Vedder's lyrics, and the ways in which he works them into the musical contexts of the songs, bear close scrutiny. They are some of his least obviously personal writings ever, but they're delivered with a renewed sense of urgency. "No time this time to feign reluctance," he sings over the jerky, Fugazi-tinged "Evacuation," a song that chronicles a bomb threat almost gleefully. "Time to take stock and make omissions," the singer states. "Time to plant seeds of reconstruction."
It's almost as if Pearl Jam think we should just tank the whole thing and start over again. The band's done as much with its career. After nearly imploding from the pressures -- many self-imposed -- of being the biggest rock band in the world, Pearl Jam stripped everything but the music away and started over again with their two previous albums, No Code and Yield.
Honestly there might be something to this, because Binaural is the band's most consistent, well-written effort yet. Pearl Jam's previous two long-players were steeped in classic rock nods (albeit brilliantly), but Binaural sounds much more modern, lending credence to the notion that this quintent could very well be an indie rock band inside a classic rock body.
The word "binaural" comes from a recording technique often employed by the album's producer, Tchad Blake. In the past, Blake has recorded entire albums using binaural "heads," which capture sound in 360 degrees and closely approximate what the music would sound like to a listener standing in the room. Although less than half of the album's 13 songs were recorded using this technique, Binaural has a textural depth unlike any previous Pearl Jam recording.
Perhaps it was the spirit of trying something new that drew the band to title the album after the process. Binaural teems with adventurous sounds, from the psychedelic, made-for-headphones effects of first single "Nothing As It Seems," to the mystic, folk-ish groove and miles-away guitar solo on "Of The Girl," to the swelling strings that close the album on the craggy "Parting Ways." Harmonies and double-tracked vocals are more apparent then ever.
In terms of song structure, Binaural is also a watershed for Pearl Jam. Guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard have subdued their individual calling cards in favor of a bevy of futuristic guitar textures and locked-in riffs. Former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, recording his first studio effort with Pearl Jam after joining the group for its 1998 U.S. tour, propels many a rocker with off-kilter time changes and signature fills.
"Grievance," a prime example of both, runs through a number of punchy riffs, each one sounding bigger and faster as Vedder ruminates on last fall's World Trade Organization riots in Seattle, thinking Orwellian thoughts about the back of a one-dollar bill and castigating his arrogant countrymen. "We're all deserving something more," he growls. "Progress, taste it / Invest it all / Champagne breakfast for everyone."
Current events, especially the Seattle riots, frame Binaural's insight into the human race. "Insignificance" finds Vedder begging forgiveness for "our hometown" and "our own time" at different points. The song, a masterpiece building from a subdued, surf-rock-influenced verse to a thundering chorus, almost theatrical in its bombastic beat, could be about anyplace from Seattle to Kosovo. "The swallowed seeds of arrogance / Breeding in the thoughts of 10,000 fools that fight irrelevance," Vedder sings. Check that. Maybe it's just about the surreal, violent world as a whole.
Whatever the case, the song is a perfect example of how Pearl Jam's individual members have grown as songwriters. Bassist Jeff Ament wrote words and music to two songs, while Gossard wrote words and music to another three. The band has long since ceased to simply document their epic battle with rock stardom. They have weightier topics to tackle. Gossard's "Rival" sets the thoughts of the Columbine killers the night before their massacre to a deep, head-bobbing groove, while the top-notch power ballad "Light Years" laments not making the most of every moment spent with a departed loved one.
But on Ament's "Sleight Of Hand," perhaps the most experimental song on the album, an intensely personal drama is played out to stunning effect amid atmospheric guitar patter and a gripping, almost overbearing chorus. Vedder, outdoing himself, chronicles the devastated life of a man who has removed himself from the people that pass through his daily life: "Sometimes he hid in his radio / watching others pull into their homes / while he was drifting."
As the music helps impart, the toll of watching life pass you by is a heavy one: "time to dream / to himself / waves goodbye / to his own self / see you on the other side," Vedder says. A dark ending to the song for sure, but this isn't the dour Pearl Jam of old that ended albums by asking "how much difference does it make." The Pearl Jam that gives us Binaural may document just how screwed up the human race has become. But they offer solutions.
The subject of the blistering "God's Dice" knows that "it's meaningless to walk away in vain," regardless of life's maddening randomness. Sometimes, the solution is purely musical, particularly on the album's sweetest song, the countrified acoustic ode "Thin Air." The song, written by Gossard, is positively '50s-ish in the narrator's adoration of his "baby." "It's not in my past to presume / love can keep on moving in both directions," Vedder croons. "How to be happy and true / is a quest we're taking on together."
Here's hoping Pearl Jam will continue its quest for a long time. Because if there's one idea that sticks out among this band's chronicling of human misery, it is a positively Lennon-esque one. The girl on the ledge? Vedder knows how to fix her up: "Only love can break her fall."
PATRICK KASTNER | Affectionately known as Cousin Patty (yes, it's a "Throw Momma From The Train" reference), Patrick Kastner is a designer for the Columbus Post-Dispatch.