21st Century Pearl Jam (6/7)
After a seven-year gap from 2013’s Lightning Bolt, Pearl Jam released its 11th studio album, Gigaton, in 2020.
Turns out it’s another weird one! Dare I liken it to No Code? I might! What genre are we? Who knows! All the genres! It doesn’t matter! Bassists playing guitar, guitarists playing bass, drummers writing lyrics, pretty much everyone playing some kind of a keyboard at some point. It’s all happening on Gigaton.
But Pearl Jam has always had five songwriters, each gravitating towards their own musical interests, which has contributed the rich variety in their catalogue. That versatility is apparent as early as Vs. (“Elderly Woman” just hanging out there on the same album as “Blood”), accelerated on Vitalogy, and famously flourished on the aforementioned No Code. And it’s in full force on Gigaton, as everyone in the band brought in bits and pieces of what they’d been working over the past seven years and stitched it all together.
Anyhoo, long story short, that’s how in 2020 Pearl Jam ended up with a minor hit that sounded like this:1
Bonus Track: “Quick Escape” has a lot of good guitar noise, some bass bassing all over the place, and a dash of that ol’ PT-adjacent content just in case we were worried that wasn’t still a thing that we were singing about.
Happy Day Threading!