My weekend is off to a fine start:
dinner out with our friend Sherrill, followed by mingling with yet more friends
(and quite a few strangers) at the Victoria Art Gallery’s Urbanite event. Urbanite used to be about 50-100 people
dressing up in their best clothes and then going to check out a little bit of
art, and do some people watching as well.
Now it has grown to an event about
five times the size, but the premise is the same; get dressed up and check each
other out. There is still art, of
course, and when you take the time to actually talk to some of the people there
you find they’re a pretty interesting crowd with some great stories and
insight. It makes me wonder how I
survived the vacuousness of nightclubs all those years in my twenties.
But on to music!
Disc 464 is…Yield
Artist: Pearl Jam
Year of Release: 1998
What’s up with the Cover? A yield sign on a highway with no merge lane. This cover reminds us that sometimes we just
have to yield to the road ahead. If you
look carefully, you can also see that the actual yield sign area is cut out,
and if you open up the disc cover, you find the same sign, this time standing
in an expanse of water. Again, I like
this reminder that sometimes you just gotta yield. You can’t wrestle with the vastness of the ocean;
the tide’s gonna come in regardless, and one day it’s gonna go out. Try to enjoy the swim while you can.
How I Came To Know It: This was just me drilling through Pearl Jam’s
collection. I think I had just bought
Pearl Jam’s 2002 album “Riot Act” and was loving it so I started drilling
backwards into some albums that I’d missed the first time around.
How It Stacks Up: I have ten Pearl Jam albums. I like them all in different ways, but I
think Yield is the best of them all. Yes, even better than “Ten.”
Rating: 5 stars
Like
Blue Oyster Cult, there is a snobbery around Pearl Jam’s discography that
relates to their first three albums. These
people must never have taken the time to listen to the brilliance that is the
band’s fifth studio album, “Yield.” “Ten
and “Vs." (reviewed way back at Disc 46) are great albums, but “Yield” is every bit their equal and a
good deal happier to boot.
Like any
band that has any longevity, Pearl Jam’s sound has evolved over the years. Pearl Jam started their move toward a more
polished sound on the much weaker fourth album, “Binaural,” but perfected their
new direction on “Yield.”
“Yield”
is still reliant on strong melodies locked into a wall of sound and (of course)
the masterful resonance of Eddie Vedder’s voice. However, the album has the anger and
moroseness in the earlier records stripped out, and replaced with some
introspection and contemplation of how insignificant we are in the great scheme
of things. I love this new direction,
and found the lyrics spoke a lot more strongly to me as a result.
“Wishlist” is the highlight on the lyrics
front, as Vedder lays out a list of things and ideas he would like to be if he
could transform. The song begins with
the line:
“I wish I were a neutron bomb
For once I could go off.”
Whether
we like to admit it or not, a big part of a successful civilization is our ability
to hold ourselves together in a world full of a lot of stresses we haven’t
really evolved to handle. In two lines
Pearl Jam sums up the tension that is sometimes generated every day, in an
appropriately apocalyptic metaphor.
Among my other favourite wishes later in the song are “I wish I was the full moon shining off a
Camaro’s hood” and “I wish I was the
souvenir you kept your house key on.”
Good things to be.
Like a
lot of songs on “Yield” “Wishlist” is
ultimately a positive song about the desire for connectivity, and the ability
for all of us to rise above our condition.
“Faithfull” speaks to how we need
to have each other’s backs in this world, and “Given to Fly” brings us through a transformation of a wandering
martyr, stabbed but rising above to give his love away to all humanity. (Lest you think this is entirely about
Christ, a later song called “Do the
Evolution” makes it very clear where Pearl Jam’s sympathies lie on this
front).
While
not denominational, “Yield” consistently explores the same themes as many
religions. How we connect, and how (as a
very wise man once advised me in a dream) we rise and fall as one. This album makes me feel good about the human
race, and that’s not always an easy sell amidst the many troubling headlines and
petty conflicts that flood our psyche every day.
Musically,
“Yield” is by far my favourite Pearl Jam album.
All the muddy parts of grunge that annoy me are stripped out and you can
hear the beauty of these songs, anthemic, slowly building with just the right
amount of guitar reverb to fill a room with energy, but never resorting to
distortion or pointless tech-effects. Sound
effects are sprinkled in (like the plane or crashing wave in “Wishlist”) but they are always perfectly
timed, and not overused.
Each
layer of sound on this album just helps build the emotional tone. The music fills you up, and gives you that
wistful side to side sway to your head, like Stevie Wonder does when he’s really
rocking out, only slower and more transcendent.
There
are a couple of weaker tracks on ‘side two’ of “Yield” like “Push Me, Pull You” which is too clever
by half, and while I love “All Those
Yesterdays” the song is too long, and ends with a strange Indian music
sound that is out of place stylistically with the rest of both the song and the
record as a whole. However, these
moments are too short to detract from the overall impact.
After
many of their earlier albums explored the more base elements of the human
condition, I found it refreshing that on “Yield” Pearl Jam turn their attention
to what we can aspire to as a species, and how that simple aspiration can have
a very real effect at making us better individuals. It certainly makes for some pretty
inspirational music. If you liked this
band in the past, but stopped listening to them after “Vitalogy” here’s
where you should re-start the conversation.
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