In ordinary times, Pearl Jam and Green Day would both be on the road right now. Pearl Jam has just released “Gigaton,” its first studio album since 2013, and was set to headline arenas. Green Day’s 2020 album has a title that appears in family newspapers as “Father of All…,” and the band booked an international stadium tour — archly titled the Hella Mega Tour — as a nostalgia-tinged triple bill with a fellow 1990s band, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy, whose debut album appeared in 2001.
Both Pearl Jam and Green Day are well aware that they’re rarities: 1990s bands that can still count on arena-sized audiences. They arrived as upstarts and have persisted through decades as headliners. The question facing them is how to avoid becoming dinosaurs.
Pearl Jam and Green Day are survivors of two disparate 1990s rock attitudes: both rooted in punk, but otherwise mismatched. Where Pearl Jam was troubled and earnest, Green Day was flippant and sarcastic; where Pearl Jam let songs grind and ruminate, Green Day’s aesthetic was loud, fast and catchy, soon to be polished into pop-punk as the band’s meticulous musicianship emerged. Both have held onto their concert audiences, and built into the songs — frequently for Green Day, more occasionally for Pearl Jam — is decades of experience hearing singalongs echoing back from the bleacher seats.
With the worldwide shutdown of concerts to stem the coronavirus pandemic, those singalongs are only figurative now. Which leaves the albums themselves, and each band’s coping strategy. In some ways, Pearl Jam and Green Day have more in common now. Both bands place themselves within a longer history of rock, flaunting their selected influences, and both have shrugged off any kind of purism or austerity, punk/grunge or otherwise.
On their new releases, the two bands have swung decisively away from the approach of their previous albums. Green Day’s 2016 “Revolution Radio” directly addressed political and social issues, with a minimum of snark or jokiness; the production harked back to “American Idiot,” clear and expansive and largely naturalistic. But the group upended all those notions for “Father of All …”
The new album updates Green Day for a 21st-century attention-deficit environment. Fast, loud and catchy is back; only three songs run longer than three minutes, and every one of those minutes is crammed with studio razzle-dazzle. Instead of taking up specific issues, most songs simply roar with generalized frustration and rage: “Drink it in, dumb it down, suck it up/As we watch the world burn,” Billie Joe Armstrong moans in “Junkies on a High.”
Instead of building the production around the sound of the band onstage, “Father of All …” piles on the overdubs, abetted by the producer Butch Walker. Guitars and drums ricochet around in stereo, changing tone and location, while shouts and screams are tucked into the mix to heighten an air of mayhem. There are squadrons of guitars, vocal harmonies and handclaps, harking back to 1970s glitter-rock. There are direct homages to early Beatles (in “Stab You in the Heart”) and to late-1960s Beach Boys (in the verses of “Graffitia”), and there are polished bursts of buzz saw punk.
It’s all very industrious, knowing and tuneful. Green Day heaps on the melodies and stadium shoutalongs-in-waiting, and its musical reflexes are strong, though some songs come close to recycling the band’s riffs and chord changes. But much of the album also comes across as merely frenetic, desperately trying to connect with memories of adolescent adrenaline. Too often, it flails so wildly to be noticed that little else registers.
Pearl Jam’s 2013 album, “Lightning Bolt,” felt labored in its own way, with insistently lean production and songs that strained for significance. The one before that, in 2009, was titled “Backspacer,” as if acknowledging that Pearl Jam was combing its past for ideas. After a seven-year gap, though, “Gigaton” presents a band that’s far more comfortable in its own identity: mature but not complacent, equally ready to reflect or roar. “Whoever said it’s all been said/gave up on satisfaction,” Eddie Vedder declares in “Who Ever Said,” the album’s opener, adding, “All the answers will be found/in the mistakes that we have made.”
That outlook runs through “Gigaton.” The lyrics often touch on the idea of acknowledging and learning from the past but not being mired in it, and of trying to transcend a dire present moment. And the music strives to live up to those goals. It keeps on stretching, prizing the limber, jamming live interplay that the band has built over the decades, but also extrapolating from it anew.
Even songs that start off in established Pearl Jam modes — the clawing guitar riffer, the steadfast march, the somber ballad — often open out in new ways. Pearl Jam has a new co-producer for “Gigaton”: Josh Evans, who has a long association with the band and with members’ solo projects. Abetted by Evans, Pearl Jam lets its songs billow outward with neo-psychedelic richness: clouds of vocal harmony or guitar tones, subtle bulwarks of keyboard, impulsive instrumental passages, playgrounds of percussion.
The songwriting on “Gigaton” comes from across the band, presumably winnowed through those seven years. Although Vedder wrote most of the lyrics, as usual, there are also songs written entirely by the drummer Matt Cameron (“Take the Long Way,” with churning 7/4 guitar riffs), the bassist Jeff Ament (the tinkling, meditative, loop-laden “Alright”) and the guitarist Stone Gossard (“Buckle Up,” a psych-folk ballad made uneasy by a spiraling guitar line and lyrics about murder).
“Dance of the Clairvoyants,” the one song credited to the entire band (which also includes the guitarist Mike McCready), is a curveball: a bass-and-blips funk workout with Vedder’s vocals echoing David Byrne in Talking Heads’ 1980 “Born Under Punches.” In “Quick Escape,” by Vedder and Ament, the band emulates Led Zeppelin — burly and wailing guitars over bashing drums and pushy bass — while Vedder sings about a Morocco excursion that turns into an exile to Mars. The band sounds like it’s having a blast.
This isn’t music that’s destined to make brand-new converts in an era of TikTok dances, laptop productions and bedroom-recorded mutterings. Its ambitions are still arena-scale: unwilling to compromise, but more than ready to shake the second mezzanine if and when a tour can happen again.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
