Pearl Jam
Ten

THE REVIEW

Let's start by stating that this is not a "grunge" album, however you might define the adjective "grunge".
1) It was not recorded at Sub Pop.
2) Pearl Jam are not lacking in musicianship.
3) The lyrics are not naive.
4) The guitars are loaded with delay and chorus.
5) Almost all the songs have the main word or phrase of the chorus as the title.
6) None of the band members have a scruffy appearance.
7) The creative imagination is nearly zero.
8) There is no punk-influenced track.
9) None of the members are stupid (or drunk) enough to destroy their instruments during the recordings.
10) There are no tracks easily playable by any loser just starting to learn guitar like me (though I can play Black quite well ;-D).

The essence of TEN is all in the cover, look at it: 5 musicians come together for TEN days and churn out an album deliberately made to stay long in the top TEN. Yes, because Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament in the '80s were two mediocre musicians fixated on heavy metal and hard rock that was trendy at the time, the kind that made easy money and allowed you to hang out with skimpy-dressed women in leather miniskirts in pure Pamela Anderson Lee Kid Rock style.
After fighting with "grunge star" Mark Arm when they were in Green River (1984-1988) and after the tragic death of the far more "glammy" Andrew Wood during the Mother Love Bone days (1988-1990), one fine day in 1990, Jeff & Stone found themselves listening to a tape featuring the performances of a 26-year-old gas station attendant-surfer from San Diego, sensitive to social issues and with a difficult family past: Edward Louis Severson III... aka Eddie Vedder.
The rest is history.

Back to the cover... all for one and one for all... but nothing could be further from the truth! Eddie Vedder is the latest addition, and almost by a twist of fate, the shortest of them all, the different one, the foreign element: he is not from Seattle, he doesn’t love heavy metal, he knows nothing about "grunge", he doesn’t own flannel shirts... but despite everything, he would become the messiah of wild rock, rising to rival Kurt Cobain in just a few months.

Vedder writes the lyrics (his only music is that of Porch) and sings on the Mookie Blaylock (Pearl Jam’s first name) tracks; poor Mike McCready was recruited only because he could blast out solos at a thousand miles per hour while drummer Dave Krusen was harshly kicked out right after the recordings. Where is the unity boasted about on the cover? Pearl Jam, as a mental cohesion, would only form between Vs (1993) and Vitalogy (1994). TEN is an album to enjoy first musically and then by analyzing the lyrics (or vice versa) because hard rock is instantaneous, but Vedder's words are not, which is why this album is not as warm as the subsequent ones. It's a challenging combination, but those 5 guys were brave and in their own way, they set a precedent.
If you don't have it, you're fools... if you consider it "grunge", you are just misinformed... and if you have had it for a long time, play it more often because the Mookie Blaylock+Eddie Vedder will never sound like this again.