Produced by Rick Parashar and Pearl Jam
Released: 1991
When Pearl Jam's debut album began to achieve its monstrous success almost a year after it was first released, critics blasted the band for riding on the coat-tails of Nirvana's success (even though Ten had actually came out a month before Nevermind) and contemporaries, most notably Kurt Cobain himself, castigated Pearl Jam for the commercial aspects of their sound. The critics, of course, were clueless and Cobain, a self-declared enemy of anything remotely mainstream, was probably being simply unfair. Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard had already made a play for mainstream success with Mother Love Bone, yet when that band dissolved with the drug death of singer Andrew Wood, the pair went in a darker direction instead of the clearly even more commercial path they had been on. While Ten is far more musically accessible than the raw punkishness of Nirvana and the sludgy metal of Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, Eddie Vedder's cerebral, personal lyrics held a deeper relevance than the disposable ditties of dozens of charting rock bands. Indeed, this was an album that appears to have succeeded in spite of itself, with dark, dramatic songs about murder, incest and suicide that were far removed from most of the radio fodder that even Nirvana couldn't kill.
Ten opens bleakly with the serial killer song "Once" and rarely surfaces from the gloom of violence and inner turmoil for the remainder of its playing time. Vedder delivers his lyrics in an unusual (though since much imitated) semi-baritone uttered like a man gargling marbles so that barely less than half of them can be clearly understood by the casual listener but their true impact lies more in this passionate vocalisation than in any concrete analysis. Written in the dark days following Wood's death, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament's riffs are big, lumbering and plodding like 70s dinosaur rock that sometimes belie the meaning of Vedder's bleak lyrical outlook. In "Even Flow", Gossard wraps a stark picture of homelessness in an upbeat, almost funky motif. "Alive" sounds like an enormous, triumphant song of inspiration surmounted by a wildly atonal guitar solo from Mike McCready that's almost bigger than the song itself; in reality the tune is about betrayal and incest.
If that wasn't grim enough, the album's centerpiece "Black" looms like a thundercloud in the middle of the album, a slow-building, emotional masterpiece of bitter heartbreak that finally explodes with something like both the despair of a spurned lover and the rage of a stalker: "I know someday you'll have a beautiful life/I know you'll be a star/In somebody else's sky, but why/Can't it be mine?" Black, indeed. Following that, almost anything would seem light-hearted, but Pearl Jam almost surpasses it with "Jeremy", a track that deceptively starts out with a pop-inflected bass harmonic but transforms into a violent tale of a kid who blows himself away in class. Further on and "Deep" is a haunting vision of drug-addicted loneliness that possibly only Layne Staley could match.
Pearl Jam was cognisant of the aspects of broad appeal while maintaining a level of artistic credibility, allowing Ten to succeed in spite of the starkness of its songs and crafting as fine a rock album as such a thing can be.
Released: 1991
When Pearl Jam's debut album began to achieve its monstrous success almost a year after it was first released, critics blasted the band for riding on the coat-tails of Nirvana's success (even though Ten had actually came out a month before Nevermind) and contemporaries, most notably Kurt Cobain himself, castigated Pearl Jam for the commercial aspects of their sound. The critics, of course, were clueless and Cobain, a self-declared enemy of anything remotely mainstream, was probably being simply unfair. Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard had already made a play for mainstream success with Mother Love Bone, yet when that band dissolved with the drug death of singer Andrew Wood, the pair went in a darker direction instead of the clearly even more commercial path they had been on. While Ten is far more musically accessible than the raw punkishness of Nirvana and the sludgy metal of Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, Eddie Vedder's cerebral, personal lyrics held a deeper relevance than the disposable ditties of dozens of charting rock bands. Indeed, this was an album that appears to have succeeded in spite of itself, with dark, dramatic songs about murder, incest and suicide that were far removed from most of the radio fodder that even Nirvana couldn't kill.
Ten opens bleakly with the serial killer song "Once" and rarely surfaces from the gloom of violence and inner turmoil for the remainder of its playing time. Vedder delivers his lyrics in an unusual (though since much imitated) semi-baritone uttered like a man gargling marbles so that barely less than half of them can be clearly understood by the casual listener but their true impact lies more in this passionate vocalisation than in any concrete analysis. Written in the dark days following Wood's death, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament's riffs are big, lumbering and plodding like 70s dinosaur rock that sometimes belie the meaning of Vedder's bleak lyrical outlook. In "Even Flow", Gossard wraps a stark picture of homelessness in an upbeat, almost funky motif. "Alive" sounds like an enormous, triumphant song of inspiration surmounted by a wildly atonal guitar solo from Mike McCready that's almost bigger than the song itself; in reality the tune is about betrayal and incest.
If that wasn't grim enough, the album's centerpiece "Black" looms like a thundercloud in the middle of the album, a slow-building, emotional masterpiece of bitter heartbreak that finally explodes with something like both the despair of a spurned lover and the rage of a stalker: "I know someday you'll have a beautiful life/I know you'll be a star/In somebody else's sky, but why/Can't it be mine?" Black, indeed. Following that, almost anything would seem light-hearted, but Pearl Jam almost surpasses it with "Jeremy", a track that deceptively starts out with a pop-inflected bass harmonic but transforms into a violent tale of a kid who blows himself away in class. Further on and "Deep" is a haunting vision of drug-addicted loneliness that possibly only Layne Staley could match.
Pearl Jam was cognisant of the aspects of broad appeal while maintaining a level of artistic credibility, allowing Ten to succeed in spite of the starkness of its songs and crafting as fine a rock album as such a thing can be.
- Once
- Even Flow
- Alive
- Why Go
- Black
- Jeremy
- Oceans
- Porch
- Garden
- Deep
- Release
Rating: 98%
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