Let’s put it this way: this is an album produced by a guy who showed up at the studio every damn day in a different Pearl Jam t-shirt. Now, some people go so far as to say that it’s in dubious taste to even wear your favorite band’s t-shirt when you go to see them live. Certainly for a musician to enter the studio and see the producer wearing your band’s logo on his chest or even worse your face must be ridiculous, if not embarrassing. But Andrew Watt is like that. He is realizing his dream of getting his hands on the bands he loved and making them listen to those who weren’t even born at the time – he was, but only just, having come to light in the days when Pearl Jam wrote the songs of Lt.
Watt is doing it with an enthusiasm that is apparently contagious. Like Rick Rubin, he cultivates the myth of the return to primitive and unfiltered expressiveness. Unlike Rick Rubin who loves to strip down the sound to find its essence, Watt limits himself to replicating it by passing it through the filter of contemporaneity. Without showing it, he is a powerful agent of nostalgia. That’s why certain albums he produces like Dark Matter or Hackney Diamonds by the Rolling Stones sound similar but not too much to the classics. They are clever records, destined to be disdained by those who think that the best is over, loved by those who are convinced that the past is always the best.
This is to say that Dark Matter, which will be released on April 19, is not only the album in which Pearl Jam have to prove after some minor tests that they still have a reason to live in the recording studio – live, as we know, it’s another matter. With a producer like that, it can only be the album of the fateful return to the past, a formula that in 90% of cases hides works in which the band tries to capture youthful energy without succeeding and this simply because we all get older and for how long we delude ourselves to the contrary, the past never returns.
In the case of Dark Matter, all that remains of the much evoked 90s band is the echo. If you have calmly accepted that Pearl Jam are no longer relevant, as is natural for musicians who have been around for many years, it is easy to let it go, also because it has been a while since we felt them so alive. In a way, this is theirs Hackney Diamondsfor better or for worse, is the essence of the group in the presence of a reduction of inspiration and stimuli, and this despite the quick pace, certainly not of almost sixty-year-olds, of Scared of Fear or React, Respondwhich are the first two recorded for the album, dictating its tone and urgency.
Self Dark Matter has a problem so it’s not the bpm, it’s not the energy. It’s certainly not the blessed ardor that Mike McCready puts into playing his typical short and convulsive solos like the one at the end of React, Respond, they are not Stone Gossard’s riffs or even references to the classics, even if a conceptual map of the album’s references could be compiled (someone even sketched it). The problem is that none of these songs seem, shall we say, inevitable. It’s what distinguishes great songs from all the others: the clear sensation that that riff, that sequence of chords, those words can only be precisely those. In Dark Matter it doesn’t happen. It’s a good record, it’s probably the best Pearl Jam can do in this confusing time and 34 years after they first met, but it has the charm of a family work, not one that shakes you emotionally.
It is difficult to identify the place that the album can have in contemporary times, if it has one. It’s not a secondary issue: we don’t always realize it, at least not right away, but we also love records for what they say about us and the time in which we live. Perhaps these songs will reveal their meanings later and form a bigger picture, but judging by the tone of Eddie Vedder’s music and lyrics, which are often vague enough to evoke both private and collective stories, Dark Matter it seems to incite us to resist the air of time which is made of pain and uncertainty, conflicts and rubble, ghosts and darkness, the latter recurring image alongside that of the end. He tells us that we must resist by creating connections and that it is also up to us to decide whether to be, to use the metaphor of Setting Sunsunset or sunrise – an idea also applicable to the group and its desire not to give up.
Vedder says these things with the “voice” of a sixty-year-old (he will become one in December) which he dedicates to his daughters Something Speciala cute song but with terrible lyrics despite the quote from Better Man which seems to be glimpsed. What is missing, and it is a shame, are strong and engaging stories like those, to give two examples, of the outsiders of Lt or the struggle with life and death of Vitalogy. Or perhaps more simply I’m asking too much of a band that released their first album in 1991 and continues to make music by releasing a collection of more or less successful songs every few years.
This record that opens with a sort of Master/Slave 2024 interrupted by the sound of Sean Penn’s billiard cue and ends with a song that conceptually completes the first, dispelling its doubts, it was written entirely by seven authors, the five Pearl Jam plus Andrew Watt and the added member Josh Klinghoffer. I don’t think it should be read as “nineteen authors for this shit” (cit.), but as: we are a band, we all wrote them together in the recording studio, let’s sign them all together. It’s a relevant point. Working in two limited time windows and above all pushing them to create together, in the moment and not alone as has happened Gigaton, Watt did Pearl Jam a good service. Maybe this was the only viable way: producing the record from the point of view of an old fan. Listened to in the context of the album, they make sense and even improve the first two extracts Running And Dark Matter (net of the tremolo effect which is a bit You are). There are three, four subpar songs, which don’t seem to go anywhere, but ultimately nothing to be ashamed of (ok, apparently today no one is ashamed of the mediocre music they release, but we get the point).
At this point in their history, when most bands have long since disintegrated, Pearl Jam sounds best when they play it safe. That is, on the one hand pieces that try to capture the synergy of musicians playing live and on the other songs that are linked to the great American tradition, that of the healthy mainstream of a Tom Petty as in Wreckageand to Vedder’s solo career – a not wrong idea, the latter being the intuition of using Watt also for Pearl Jam born from the sessions of Earthling and being Into the Wild the best thing done by the band and its members in a lifetime. The oddities, one of the house’s specialties for thirty years, are kept in check, there’s just a new wave guitar tone like Cure in Won’t Tell and little else. Other references are decidedly more familiar, from the Who in Got to Give at Soundgarden in Waiting for Stevie (which would then be Stevie Wonder, who Watt and Vedder were waiting for in the studio at the time of Earthling). Seeing that Pearl Jam does well for themselves and that they can’t do much else is both satisfying for those who love them with a visceral love and disappointing for everyone else.
Eddie Vedder said that when he saw Watt wearing a Pearl Jam t-shirt he pretended nothing was happening. Very wise. The message, however, got through and the singer was right not to ignore the producer’s fantasies of capturing some of the greatness of the old Pearl Jam. With his fan enthusiasm and his know-how, Watt has the merit of having produced an album in which the band leaves aside any clumsy attempt to make it strange and any pretense of being contemporary or in his pop style. It’s already something after diskettes like Backspacer, Lightning Bolt And Gigaton. It makes you want to turn up the volume as you listen Dark Matter and then to listen to it a second time. For Pearl Jam it won’t be a new dawn, but it won’t be a sunset either.
