SOUND BITES

(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...

Pearl Jam has been my favourite band for over twenty-five years. Anyone who halfway knows me knows this, and I don't need to trot out my credentials and prove my fandom to anyone. That said, I own every album on CD and vinyl, in addition to a good handful of official live bootleg CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, posters and books. I even own a promotional mobile that came out to promote Vitalogy in 1994. I hitchhiked an hour's drive to buy that CD just over 25 years ago, and nearly froze to death on the long, dark walk/drive back, but that's a long story for another time. Anyway, suffice it to say that I was beyond excited to hear the first taste of their upcoming 11th studio album, Dance of the Clairvoyants , when it premiered last night. I stayed up despite having to work early this morning so I could dive into the new tune the moment it dropped. When it did arrive, I played it six times consecutively to be sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. What I was hearing was...

So, here we are again. Another year (damn, another decade) is here, and once again I'm writing out an "I've been bad at this" post. You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd assume that my heart just wasn't into this thing anymore and be using this space to announce the closure of Sound Bites. To be honest, that's something I've seriously considered over the past year and change, as it always seems like I've been unable to keep up with things around here for one reason or another (and, if I'm being totally honest with myself, most of those reasons = laziness). One thing leads to another and, before I know it, I'm behind by 30-50 reviews and the only way to chip away at the backlog is to summarize albums that talented people put a lot of time, care and hard work into with a haiku. While I did receive some positive reinforcement for doing that, something about it just doesn't feel right to me. Therein lies my dilemma; I want ...

As we near the completion of another year, it's only natural to look ahead to what's to come; alongside resolutions and reflections, we find reasons to be excited for the future as the calendar changes and time begins anew. What this means for me, of course, is that it's time to get hyped for all of the new music we could be getting. Whereas in years previous, I would mark the start of a new year with my "What Are the Chances?" posts, and attach arbitrary percentages to what I felt was possible, this year I've decided to ditch the format and just talk about my personal hype levels concerning certain bands getting new material in our ear holes in 2019. So, I divided this article into four levels of hype: mild, moderate, high and extreme. I think that's pretty self explanatory, so let's just go ahead and get hyped! MILDLY HYPED: ANTHRAX Whether or not it comes out in 2019 is anyone's guess, but Anthrax is due to begin work on the follow-up t...

2018 has been a hell of a year. If you're the average Joe and/or Jane who stumbles across this place every so often, you may have noticed it's been pretty quiet around here. Aside from a spate of reviews here and there and the maintenance of the weekly Top 40/upcoming releases sections, it's been slim pickings for Sound Bites content (especially over the past four months or so). I've never claimed to be the most on-the-ball guy when it comes to posting, but even by my standards this year has been sub-par. For that, I apologize, and hope to do better going forward. That said, though it doesn't excuse the silence, I'll try to explain how life got in the way this year without dwelling on details or laying it on too thick; those closest to me know all of this already, and there's no point in trying to get sympathy from strangers. In April, my mother passed away; she had battled diabetes for decades, and after numerous trials and tribulations she ...

Well, 2017 was an interesting year, and one full of choices in terms of music. That's already yesterday's news, though, as 2018 is here and wasting no time in giving us reasons to be excited. We already have a handful of releases confirmed, including some I'm really looking forward to from the likes of Corrosion of Conformity, Brian Fallon, Superchunk, Screaming Females and Manic Street Preachers. Of course, we both know you didn't start reading this article to hear about what we already know. "What Are the Chances?" is all about predicting the unknown, reading palms and gazing into crystal balls. Naturally, some releases are easier to predict than others (we have bands like A Perfect Circle virtually guaranteeing action in the form of advance singles, while for others it's been all but confirmed in interviews). Some are total shots in the dark, crapshoots that can go either way, while some are very unlikely to see light of day in the next year. Before...