When I think of Pearl Jam, I picture arch-miserabilist Eddie Vedder collapsing out of his dark cocoon to groan to his band: “Ah! My friends! Help me express my existential angst!” at which point Stone Gossard would strike a pose and begin playing some riffed, amped-up metallic variation of the sort of boogie-woogie ‘blooze’ bollocks favoured by a zillion beard-sprouting, barber-dodging post-Zep seventies bands.
In many ways, Vedder was at least as coherent a spokesperson for generational angst and anti-social solipsism as the lyrically lazy and “impressionistic” Kurt Cobain. Unfortunately, his band were essentially unreconstructed hair-metallers perma-grinning through the sea of grunge-tastic tulips (as one of those tulips, I thought they were great).
On their tenth album, Vedder, possibly buoyed by the Obama presidency, is taking a less downbeat and political slant across his chums’ happy-slappy, fret-shredding rock ‘n’roll. Indeed, at times here Vedder actually seems joyous, and his existential angst appears to be replaced by existential wonder, as if he woke up one morning and went... “beautiful wife... career as a rock star... millions of dollars... hold on a minute, BEING EDDIE VEDDER IS AWESOME!”
Tempting as it is to lodge a tongue in my lower lip and begin a sarcastic slow-handclap, it must be pointed out that Backspacer contains two genuinely beautiful ballads, ‘Speed Of Sound’ (piano-laden and optimistic) and ‘Just Breathe’ (all strings, picked guitars and glockenspiels) as well as the expansive space-rock of ‘Unthought Unknown’. Of course, it also has its fair share of brain-dead bluesy rock songs that would have made the Spin Doctors embarrassed (‘Amongst the Waves’ and ‘Supersonic’). But Backspacer isn’t awful at all.