Icona Pop collaboration imminent?
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[5.12]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: A spirited gnarl, doing away with any levels of pretension in favour of just raging through a song as fast and passionately as possible. For what is essentially a straightforward seethe, a stretching exercise from a band that’s three decades in the game, “Mind Your Manners” is a reminder that making no-fucking-about rock music is still so, so necessary.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Who would have thought that Pearl Jam would have been the band that lasted through the Seattle movement — steadily, not as a stop-start, not retreating back to their cult when they got tired? I mean, I guess Carrie Brownstein or Kathleen Hanna keep hiring the same members for new bands, so it’s kinda sorta like that, but no — Pearl Jam is just the little ego-less engine that could. I keep hoping that Vedder’s politics will lead him to do something like The Seeger Sessions, but they were the least interesting of the grunge bands, and that might be a risk, and they don’t strike me as the riskiest.
[3]
Cédric Le Merrer: As late career moves go, 80s heavy metal revivalism is probably more courageous than say, Springsteenesque rockism, but there’s a fine line between courageous and plain stupid. This lands somewhere in between, right between “silly” and “endearing.” Unfortunately, plain stupid would have been a better fit for an 80’s heavy metal revival.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: Like The Simpsons, Pearl Jam did such great work for a period in the ’90s that I forgive them for spending what now amounts to more than half their existence loitering in mediocrity, though I do pretend material made by either after the Clinton administration ended doesn’t exist. The shouty “Mind Your Manners” is livelier than most of the band’s post-Yield drabness — it shares that with “The Fixer,” the band’s last better-than-you-remember lead single — but they could have instead reissued “Spin the Black Circle” and I guarantee no one would have complained.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: I wouldn’t have thought it would be possible for them to get more leadfooted and lyrically clunky than in their heyday. I was wrong.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: I’ve always found Pearl Jam’s thrashier moments a bit hard to swallow. It’s not that they can’t play fast, tight and loud — they can — it’s that Eddie Vedder always has been and always will be such a squarely earnest singer and that doesn’t gel so well with thrashing about. They were never as dumb as people thought, and they certainly don’t play dumb well either. Dig the harmonies (not quite otherworldly, but certainly otherbandly) in the middle, though.
[5]
Alfred Soto: I didn’t need to look at the credits: a Mike McCready song like “Given To Fly” and “Marker in the Sand” refracted by Eddie Vedder’s affection for punk. The gnarly stuttering riffs push Vedder into darker hues than usual too. But until the final seconds the band takes the title seriously.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Since Vs., the grey geese of Pearl Jam have, with every studio project, lobbed at their fans a softboiled punk egg. As a lapsed fan, I have to say — they used to be delicious. I’m talking “Blood” and “Spin the Black Circle” and “Brain of J.” No Code‘s “Lukin” barely cleared a minute, and were it not for the backstory, it would be an intolerable indulgence. That’s a major irony for filler you could wait out at a stoplight, but such is this band’s way. They’re small, we’re told, it’s only the arenas that got bigger. But even if you don’t know Ten from 11, “Mind Your Manners” sounds like a band slumming for a different kind of cred. With Backspacer, they caught themselves in the act: acoustic feelfests alongside carbonated takes on punk rock. Alas, McCready declared this record will be more of the same, a combo platter of punk and Pink Floyd, years after the discovery that the two can share the same body. Eddie’s glorious baritone tweaks vague masters and sabotages the SoCal riffing. (“Mind your manners” betrays the band’s true age as much as the Kennedy exorcism in “Brain of J.”) But the bridge finds them in a comfortably existential place. Vedder nurtures a cloudpoking vocal line, the gang chips in stirring harmonies, and we get a perfect couplet for the Rock Age: “May not live another life/May not solve a mystery.” They sure didn’t. How about your champion?
[5]