Pearl Jam doesn't 'Fly'

Stefan Betz Bloom

Pearl Jam

Yield

Epic

Pearl Jam was never really an "alternative" band. Yeah, they wore ripped denim and flannel shirts and sang about the pain of being misunderstood, but while Soundgarden based their sound around '70s metal riffs and Nirvana drew on American punk and English post-punk, Vedder ("Ed" now, not "Eddie") and the boys came out of a different tradition: arena rock, exactly the sound alternative was supposed to be a response to. It's not like they had grand dreams of being the next Foreigner or anything, but their appeal, at least on their first two releases Ten and Vs., had less to do with the lyrical angst and more to do with their big, classic, booming sound. In a lot of ways, Pearl Jam was the only pre-punk Seattle act.

And it's not like arena rock is necessarily a bad thing: fact is that AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" is a really great song, and the Replacements covered Kiss's "Black Diamond" and made a damn good song out of it. But even from the beginning, Pearl Jam had too much dinosaur in them, and a real tendency toward bombast and self-indulgence.

The reason Ten's "Alive" and "Black" (along with the "Jeremy" B-side "Yellow Leadbetter") are still their best songs is exactly the same reason that they were big hits: they're catchy, and they make for good sing-alongs. And as the band became increasingly wrapped up in cultivating a kind of earnest integrity, they lost not only their sense of humor, but also any kind of accessibility. Their anti-TicketMaster campaign was a good thing for music fans and concertgoers, but not really worth the self-absorbed solipsism that made 1994's Vitalogy and 1996's No Code such unlistenable, pretentious disasters.

So now, on the heels of No Code's commercial bust, Yield is being billed as a kind of return to form - catchier, faster; more like Ten. And it is, sort of. "Given to Fly" is pretty catchy, "Low Light" has an almost R.E.M.-like melody, and the album-opener "Brain of J." sounds a lot like old times. But even at its best it all sounds like a step backward, a trip back to 1991 like nothing's changed, when the fact is that everything has.

It's not like anyone was expecting an electronica record from Pearl Jam, and there's something sort of impressive about Yield's straightforward earnestness in a year filled with throwaway pop confections. But it's not enough - Pearl Jam may have their hearts and their politics in the right place, but them ripping off themselves is actually less pleasant than hearing the original Pearl Jam rips, Stone Temple Pilots, who at least pulled it off with style. And better riffs.

It's not like Yield's a bad album, really, but it's kind of a minor one, and a minor record from an act as big in both sound and stature as Pearl Jam is a sort of depressing and almost pathetic thing. No Code was a failure, but at least it was a failure on the band's own terms; Yield's like a failed sell-out, and the fact that it's just not all that good and kind of generic is more disturbing than if it had been really terrible.