The new album by Pearl Jam starts with a fade-in. A long fade in, to calmly sneak into the album’s atmosphere. Then, stop. A short pause prepares the actual attack of the first track, Scared of Fear. The eruption of the alternative rock riff of the guitar anticipates the entry of the voice of Eddie Vedder: «Oh, did I say something wrong?». Here we are, it has begun Dark Matter, Pearl Jam’s twelfth album. Listening to it, right from the first songs, one wonders if it is the Seattle band’s best work of the last twenty years. According to Vedder, yes. Actually, even better. According to the frontman it is their best album ever. He said it himself to the fans, from the stage Troubadour Club of Los Angeles, on the occasion of the presentation of the album. There’s probably no need to bother with their great records from the nineties, a piece of American grunge history. But it is true that, beyond Vedder’s enthusiasm, Dark Matter it is certainly one of the best works that Pearl Jam have created in the new century, especially as regards the arrangements and production.
Alexander Gnezdilov
Self Dark Matter (Monkeywrench/Republic) is such a successful album, the credit also goes to the producer who worked on it, the American Andrew Watts. The 33-year-old – who, in the last year alone, has worked with Iggy Pop, Maroon 5, Post Malone And Rolling Stones – is a big Pearl Jam fan. And like any self-respecting fan, he has a special place in his heart where he keeps the band’s first two albums sheltered, Lt And Vs. The two albums which, at the dawn of the nineties, launched Pearl Jam towards rapid global success. And it was precisely from those sensations and those atmospheres that Watt decided to draw for the production of Dark Matterabandoning the dark deviation of the previous album, Gigaton (2020). During the three weeks of recording, in the historic Shangri-La studio in Malibu, California, Pearl Jam – Eddie Vedder, Matt Cameron, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready And Stone Gossard – they’re back to doing what they do best. Without the obsession of having to experiment with something new at all costs, enthusiastically accepting their status as timeless “classics” of the genre (see the mid-tempo ballads, like Wreckage).
Special mention for vocal melodieswhose effectiveness, however, has the involuntary result of further highlighting the fact that writing of Vedder is less in focus than usual. The lyrics describe, cryptically, the importance of human connections and the pain caused by their absence. But they also address the feelings of unease caused by contemporary society and its political protagonists. In Runningone punk brackets two minutes into the album, they address a symbolic dictator: «Dictator, love hater. Lost in the tunnel and the tunnel ain’t no fun. Now I’m lost in all the shit you’re flushing.” He feels it clearly angerbut turns out less incisive compared to when the performers shouted it from the depths of their twenties.
More exciting and empathetic, however, is the band’s attempt to deal with the time that passes. The sense of end is one of the main protagonists of the lyrics of Dark Matter. In Upper Hand – one of the strongest songs on the album – the almost sixty-year-old Vedder leafs through a metaphorical book, in which there is no more space left to write new pages: «The distance to the end is closer now than it’s ever been». But the transience of things, which worries the band, is not always a source of suffering. The conclusion of a love, sung in the last piece of the album, Setting Sun, is a bittersweet farewell: «Had dreams to you I would belong. Held the dream you would stay with me till kingdom come.” The thought of the end no longer brings with it suffering, but only a melancholic and placid feeling romance. «Let us not fade».
Playlists
Anna Castiglia, Ghemon – Whitman
The list representative – Paradise
Local Natives – Throw It In The Fire
