Pearl Jam
Dark Matter

A distracted listen, in the car, while driving home from work. But it's enough, because I'm much older and so are they. Let's not kid ourselves. It takes very little for me to recognize that stale flavor, that feeling of a soulless exercise. I could say where the songs are headed by listening to just the first thirty seconds. A workout for the vocal cords and for the fingers of musicians who obviously have to bring home the bacon and do what they do best. Too bad that in rock music, which is romantic and progressive music, repetition is not well-tolerated; there's a need for novelty. At least a pinch.

I have some reflections. I think that such plasticized and infinitely reproduced rock betrays its premises. It's almost unlistenable. What remains if we take the soul out of a band like Pearl Jam? Not extraordinary technical qualities, some driving rhythms, okay, a beautiful voice. But everything fades into boredom, because there's no emotion supporting the machine that’s grinding miles. There's not a single surprise. It becomes like an assembly line, and the products (tracks) churned out in series are almost indistinguishable from one another.

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I think of poor Kurt, I think of the Clash, this music can't last too long. If your songs carry rebellion, the youthful fervor of standing against, you can't think you’ll go on proclaiming your revolt for your whole life. Because in the long run, revolutions end in dictatorship.

Perhaps Eddie Vedder's band never fully embraced this philosophy, and today finds itself in this golden limbo (or maybe hell?) where it continues as if condemned to churn out useless albums, to do sold-out tours, in fact diluting the memory, consolidating the feeling that the craft prevails over the spirit.

There could be an alternative: aesthetic research. I've always been a supporter of this trend, because rock music, when well-crafted, still represents quite a treat for the ears of us no longer young. But it must be supported by a different palette of colors. Perhaps the PJ have always lacked this: an overall limited range of nuances, and as long as the creative vein pumped strongly, no one dreamed of questioning them. But without variety, these late works resemble faded copies of a thousand summaries.

“Black”, “Nothing Man”, “Corduroy” come out once in a lifetime. You can't think of spending the rest of your career chasing the mirage of those perfect songs, without realizing that by now you're wandering in the middle of the desert.