One of grunge’s last bands standing, Pearl Jam, recently announced a new album (Gigaton) and concurrent tour. The first single from that album, “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” was released yesterday, and … it is not what I expected. Maybe not what anyone expected?
“Dance of the Clairvoyants” starts off with what sounds like a stark drum machine groove (though it’s probably just heavily processed live drums played by Matt Cameron), then a bubbling synth line over a dark wash of electronic bass. I had to double-check to make sure this was the new Pearl Jam track and not something from The Killers or White Lies. Then, sure enough, Eddie Vedder’s distinctive (though restrained) warble kicks in, and the cognitive dissonance gets worse. When guitars finally kick in mid-verse, they’re angular and choppy, further pushing this song into the dance-y post-punk territory previously staked out by the likes of Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. Honestly, as a fan of all of those bands, I should have loved it immediately. But it’s not what I wanted to hear from Pearl Jam.
Then I listened to it again. And again. And again. I’m listening to it right now. And once I take off the “but this is not what Pearl Jam is supposed to sound like” ear-glasses, it’s a good song. Not going to go down as an all-time PJ classic, but definitely a sing-along groover that encourages booty-shaking. There’s a lot of intense vocal punctuation by Vedder. Interesting guitar sounds from Mike McCready and Stone Gossard. It all builds up to a funky, multi-layered outro (which, geez, sounds so much like the outro for The Killers’ B-side “Where the White Boys Dance”) that perfectly punctuates the song.
I have a tenuous relationship with Pearl Jam. Like most of us GenXers who were teenagers when the band’s debut album, Ten, appeared seemingly out of nowhere in 1991, their dramatic and sometimes dark, guitar-and-groove-fueled songs naturally appealed to me. I didn’t become a huge fan then, but I dug every song that I heard (especially “Black,” not surprisingly), and some of the earliest songs I learned on guitar were riffs from Pearl Jam songs. I didn’t care much for their sophomore album, Vs., when it came out in 1993. By then I was deep into discovering older and darker music–The Doors, The Cure, Danzig, etc. (Ironically, Vs. would eventually become my favorite Pearl Jam album.)
I didn’t think much about PJ again until I was working a day job in a retail stockroom, during which I’d pass the time listening to the radio (usually bouncing between KUNV 91.5-FM’s jazz programming and KEDG 103.5-FM’s alternative rock). That’s about the time their third album Vitalogy dropped, and Pearl Jam started veering into gritty Neil Young territory (and collaborations), and seemed to be getting interesting again. But, again, I didn’t buy any albums or do much more than appreciate what I heard on the radio.
That remained the case for basically the next decade-plus. A band I liked when I heard them, whose first couple of albums are basically flawless, who I wouldn’t mind seeing live, but never did because they didn’t tour where I lived (or didn’t tour, period). As the years went on, many of their peers died off, and I started to realize that maybe seeing Pearl Jam live would be something I should do before I don’t have the chance to do so again.* They hadn’t played Las Vegas since 2000 and didn’t appear to be coming back (the current tour skips Sin City again), so I tried to get tickets to the few shows they did book, including the “PJ20” 20th anniversary shows in Seattle. I failed every time.
So, when the latest tour announcement went out, I was pleased to see that Pearl Jam was doing two nights at The Forum in L.A., plus a few other dates I’d happily travel for (including Vedder’s former stomping ground, San Diego). I signed up for Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan Presale (another bit of irony, given the band’s infamous (and failed) battle with the ticket seller in the 1990s), got in the digital queue when tickets went on sale this morning, and, well, on April 15, I’ll finally get to find out if seeing Pearl Jam live is worth the 30-year wait. Just to be safe, nobody cough or sneeze around Mssrs. Vedder, Ament, Gossard, McCready or Cameron between now and then.
*Despite having passes for it, my wife and I skipped out on attending night three of Kaaboo a few years ago, which means I missed seeing Tom Petty live again–a week before he died.