SOUND BITES

Let's get one thing straight out of the way: Gigaton isn't the grand return to form some of those glowing pre-release reviews might lead you to believe. I've personally read some critics talk about how this is Pearl Jam's best record in twenty years and, while I can see how it would strike people that way at first blush, I can't in good conscience as a longtime fan look past the inconsistencies in quality that pepper this record. The way I see it, to turn a blind eye to this album's shortcomings is a disservice to myself and anyone who's reading this right now. Of course, by "shortcomings", I'm not talking about the album itself; at 57 minutes with nary an interlude or hidden track to be heard, Gigaton certainly lives up to its title in terms of relative size; it's Pearl Jam's longest album to date, and they do allow the songs ample room to breathe, with tracks routinely stretching out toward the five minute range or longer. This i...

(Collage courtesy diffuser.fm) When it comes to thinking about your favourite band, it can be a herculean task to put things in any kind of ranked order; it might be easy enough to make a list in order of preference on any given day, but these things are always kind of fluid by nature. There are so many factors that can disrupt the order you've created; mood changes, dug-up memories, or hearing a song under a different set of circumstances can all adjust your conceptions of where the chips fall in terms of preference. For me, this is especially difficult for full-length albums; while I always try to separate the music from the time, it's impossible not to associate an album with the point in your life where you discovered it. In the case of Pearl Jam, this is even more pronounced because I can usually tell you not just what was going on my life when these albums were released, but where I bought them, who I was with and how I felt when listening start to finish for t...

As we discussed yesterday, Pearl Jam is a band with a lot of great singles to their name. What's perhaps just as striking about them, however, is how many great songs they have that were never released as singles. Indeed, for virtually every album they've put out thus far, there's at least one amazing song that (in my opinion, of course) could have fared much better in terms of success than what they actually released as a single at the time. Of course, this was all by the band's own mad design; as we'll learn from the first song on this list, Pearl Jam developed a hesitancy early on to promote themselves too heavily for fear of being chewed up and spit out by the industry and fans alike. Whether or not things would have turned out much differently isn't for any of us to decide, and however they handled their affairs was certainly up to them. Nearly thirty years later and they're still here, still (mostly) relevant and with their status as flashes in the...

As could be expected of any band that's approaching thirty years of existence and are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Pearl Jam have released a lot of singles in their time. According to Wikipedia, they've sent 39 songs out as singles to date, although four of those are one-offs that weren't specifically intended for promotional use. That leaves 35 songs singled out (pun intended, of course) over the course of eleven albums, which is a decent amount to pore through if you want to do something crazy like, oh I don't know, rank them. What's just as striking to me when looking down the list of officially released Pearl Jam singles is the lack of a lot of their best songs; plenty of phenomenal tracks that stand up today as some of the band's best-known songs never got their due as promotional singles, which gives me a good idea for the next post. Anyway, the premise is simple: here's my countdown of all of Pearl Jam's singles to date in orde...

Although it sometimes feels like I've been a Pearl Jam superfan forever, that isn't the case. Truth be told, I didn't even get caught up in the initial fervor that happened when the video for Jeremy hit and Ten made Pearl Jam one of the world's biggest bands. I remember obtaining Ten through Columbia House; specifically, I remember that it had arrived with ten other CDs while I was at Grand Lake camping with my family in the summer of 1992. When I spun it, I thought it was okay, but it kind of got lost in the shuffle with all those other new additions to my collection. Even when Vs. was released a little over a year later and set the record for the most copies sold in an album's first week, one of those copies wasn't mine; just like with Ten , I was content to wait until I could get Vs. through Columbia House a few months after its release. However, something happened during the winter and spring of 1994 that would change me forever; with the tension of gr...

There has always been a degree of controlled chaos at play in the music of Code Orange; as they have progressed over the last decade or so, they have built a reputation not just for threading the needle between the brutal and the melodic, but for indeed pulling heavy music kicking and screaming out some of its most tired clichés. On their last outing, 2017's Forever , they pushed at the boundaries of what was expected even for them, allowing glitchy industrial flourishes into their hardcore/extreme compositions as a way to keep things unsettling and interesting. Moreover, they dared to swing the pendulum further to the other side as well, letting themselves explore their more accessible urges. The result was a minor hit in Reba Meyers-sung alt-rock howler Bleeding in the Blur , which led to Code Orange being commissioned to write the entrance theme for WWE wrestler Bray Wyatt, in what I think is one of the oddest ways a heavy band can rise to fame. Minor successes aside, it...

( B-Sides the Point is a new series in which I'll take a look at some of my favourite bands and venture outside of their conventional releases, choosing instead to focus on material that never ended up on any of their studio albums. There may be technicalities involved wherein not every song is specifically a B-Side, just so you know; soundtracks, compilation tracks and one-offs are fair game here, so if you could kindly look past the title of the series while understanding that the point is to highlight artists' best non-album songs, that would help. Ready? Let's go.) If I'm going to start talking about artists who have kept some of their finest work away from their studio albums (and you're reading this, so I did), you'd better believe I'm starting with Pearl Jam. Aside from being my favourite band of all time, they've peppered their discography with songs that are absolutely amazing and, for one reason or another, these songs never found homes on...