The Listening Post

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Smashing Pumpkins: Aghori Mhori Mei

Alghori Mhori Mei

In some ways I feel bad for Billy Corgan. The man is following his muse wherever it takes him, but the places he’s going are very different than the places where he established his stardom. His last album, ATUM, is a synthesizer-heavy, triple disc, concept album about space. Or something. He sold it as a sequel to the albums Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Machina/The Machines of God, explaining in a 33-part podcast that the main character in ATUM, Shiny, was Zero on Mellon Collie (not a concept album) and Glass on Machina (also not a recognizable concept album). Man, that’s a lot of Billy Corgan to digest. The problem for Corgan is that, except for his instantly recognizable vocals, the album swapped out the heavy guitars of his heyday in favor of washes of synthesizer and didn’t sound anything like the alternative rock masterpieces of Gish or Siamese Dream. The fact that ATUM followed three previous albums that were increasingly reliant on synths was not good news to fans of the old band. This was at a time when he had reunited most of the original band but seemed to be running as fast as he could in the opposite direction of their original sound. His primary audience largely forgot about the band, relegating them to warm feelings of nostalgia. New audiences are hard to come by these days in the age of streaming.

Now Corgan has responded to the pleas of his old audience and released an album that sounds like it would have fit very comfortably on the radio in 1994. On Aghori Mhori Mei, the twin guitar attack of Corgan and James Iha is back, and Jimmy Chamberlin has been turned loose to attack his drum kit once again. The album sounds loose and freewheeling, released from the confines of synths and click tracks. This is a band that is once again firing on all cylinders.

Which isn’t to say that the album is as good as their work from 1990 to 1995, only that it sounds of a piece. The Pumpkins in that golden era of alternative rock were one of the brightest stars in the galaxy, fusing bone-pulverizing riffs and dreamy psych-pop, releasing some of the best singles and albums of the decade. Aghori Mhori Mei is not Siamese Dream Part Two. It is, however, an excellent return to form.

Lyrically this may be the most cryptic Pumpkins album. As if the title of the collection wasn’t enough, song names include “Edin”, “Sighommi”, “999”, “Goeth the Fall”, “Sicarus”. The final track, “Murnau”, is apparently named after F.W. Murnau, the director of the original silent movie Nosferatu. What the lyrics have to do with the director, or his films is a mystery to me. There’s also reference made to Corgan’s interest in Hinduism, with the title word “Aghori” meaning a devotee of Shiva, and “Sicarus” containing the plea “Kali, let’s touch beyonds with us” and “Kali of dawn satnam shri ram” which translates to something George Harrison might have understood. Who really cares when the song has a terrific guitar solo and a cool stun gun riff that heralds the chorus? Not me. I learned in the 1990s to just go with Corgan’s lyrical flow. And what’s a “labyrinth milk syringe” (“Pentagrams”)?

Musically it’s all here, as if preserved in amber from the outtakes of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Riffs abound (“Edin”, “Pentagrams”, “Sighommi”, the brutal “War Dreams of Itself”, “Sicarus”), there’s slower, sludgy tracks (“999”), and floaty ballads (“Pentecost”, “Who Goes There?”, “Goeth the Fall”, “Murnau”).

Corgan is not the only star of this show. While it’s impossible to differentiate Corgan’s guitar leads from James Iha’s, Jimmy Chamberlin’s drums stand out from the distortion. Rolling, tumbling, and crashing like a tsunami on the shore, Chamberlin proves again that he’s one of rock’s greatest drummers ever. On the previous Pumpkins albums he sounded restrained, held in check by the synthesizers. On Monuments to an Elegy he was briefly replaced by the ham-fisted Tommy Lee, who can’t even pronounce the word “subtlety”. On Aghori he’s back and completely fired up, clearly thrilled to be rocking with abandon again.

In an interview with Kerrang this past July, Corgan announced this album and said that “old-school fans will be happy, for once”. It is, in a way, a sad comment. It makes one feel that this triumph of an album is just a throwaway to Corgan, something to get the “old-school fans” off his back so he can go back to space operas and synth-pop. It would be a shame if that were the case. The next album will tell, I suppose, but for now it’s a pleasure hearing two great guitarists and one great drummer turned loose.

Grade: A-

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Jack White: No Name

Rock’s most notorious prankster has struck again. On July 19th (my birthday) anybody who bought a vinyl album at the Third Man store received a free gift with purchase: a vinyl record in a plain white sleeve, bearing the words “No Name” with song titles as “Side One, Track One”, “Side One, Track Two”, etc. There was no other information, but there was a picture of the record on Third Man’s Instagram page with the command to “rip it.” Copies of the album immediately began appearing on YouTube as the lucky owners realized that they were holding a brand new, unannounced, Jack White album. A week later the album appeared, with song titles and the official name of No Name, only on streaming services…quite a switch from the current king of vinyl who has a somewhat undeserved reputation as being a Luddite.

White’s recent solo releases have leaned towards heavier, bordering on industrial, music, as if you were hearing the White Stripes playing Nine Inch Nails. The creative misfire, 2018’s Boarding House Reach, was both the zenith of this style and the nadir of his career. Noisy, harsh, and largely tuneless, Reach set the tone for 2022’s Fear of the Dawn, which was just as noisy and harsh but had a few more tunes.

Dawn was the first half of a musical diptych, followed only a few months later by Entering Heaven Alive, a beautifully paced collection of acoustic-tinged ballads and mid-tempo songs that was White’s best album since the magnificent Blunderbuss, his initial foray into solo work. Now, two years later, comes No Name, an album that received no hype whatsoever. There was no marketing, and no physical release at all until earlier this month. There have been no videos. News of the album was strictly word of mouth. Many fans, not knowing what they had in their possession, probably assumed the album was a throwaway.

It wasn’t.

No Name eclipses Entering Heaven Alive as the best Jack White solo album since Blunderbuss. In many ways, it harkens back to the White Stripes of Elephant and Icky Thump. This is the most minimalist album White has done since the Stripes. Most songs feature just three musicians. Only one song (“That’s How I’m Feeling”) features a full band of guitar, bass, multiple drummers, and keyboards, but the stars of this show are White and his fellow Raconteur Patrick Keeler on drums. It’s also a family affair with White’s wife, Olivia Jean, playing bass on “Old Scratch Blues” and “That’s How I’m Feeling,” while his teenage daughter Scarlett adds the bottom end to the delightful “Archbishop Harold Holmes” and “Underground.” Perhaps best of all is “Number One With A Bullet” which features just White and Keeler in a tantalizing glimpse of what the White Stripes would have sounded like with a more conventional drummer.

The minimalism extends to the packaging, featuring the same blue-tinted image on both the front and the back cover, a simple black inner sleeve, and a white-on-black lyric sheet. The name of the artist and album appear only on the spine of the album.

This is the hardest rocking album in White’s career. There are no ballads to soften the blows that come fast and furious in the thirteen tracks. Even the songs that start gently explode into a fury before too long. Throughout the album the musicians are in overdrive, from the Stripes-ish mutant blues of “Bless Yourself” to the punky thrash of “Bombing Out” and “Missionary”, which cops the opening riff from the Clash’s “Clash City Rockers.”

White’s sense of humor is also present. “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking)” mourns the world we’re leaving behind for our furry brethren. “The world is worse than when we found it/It sure must be rough on rats…But I should stop complaining every time it’s raining/’Cause I’m still not food for cats.” Meanwhile, “Archbishop Harold Holmes” takes the form of a letter from the title parson who promises the answers to all life’s questions “If you’ve been crossed up by hoodoo, voodoo/The wizard or the lizard/You got family trouble?/Man trouble?/Woman trouble?” But the solution is a Ponzi scheme, the prosperity gospel that promises wealth if you first give all you’ve got: “By sundown, Monday/You who come will be blessed with the big money blessing/You will be doubted by all the unbelievers/On all the things I’m addressing/But you must tell seven friends/You must first bring seven friends.”

“What’s the rumpus?” White asks before harkening back to his younger days as a musician. “When will the label dump us?/They tried to stump us/What genre will they lump us?” It’s a sincere question coming from a musical iconoclast like Jack White. His music skips merrily from heavy rock to blues to rap to country to bluegrass…sometimes all in the same song (e.g., “Lazaretto”). He’s spent his entire career blurring distinctions between genres while still sounding like himself. From the cheap plastic guitars and red/white/black color scheme of the White Stripes to the suit-wearing, blue-haired troubadour of Entering Heaven Alive, White has remained his own man and has achieved great success by doing things his way. While No Name calls back to his earlier days in terms of sound and distortion, it’s very much the work of a mature artist who, after twenty-five years making music, still has a lot to offer and a lot to prove to himself.

Grade: A

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The Rolling Stones: Blue and Lonesome

Blue and LonesomeAs the Rolling Stones got older, long past the retirement age of mere mortals, and as Jagger’s salacious sex addict lyrics sounded sillier and sillier coming out of his wrinkled puss, fans such as myself began wishing that the Stones would show a little dignity in their old age and go back to their first love: blues. A solid blues album, maybe with a few acoustic blues numbers and a Chuck Berry cover or two, would be a great way for the band to come to the end of the line. Full circle, and all that cal. In 2016, the band delivered, though not quite in the hoped-for way. Rather than a bunch of Jagger/Richards originals, the blues album they delivered was all cover songs, mostly more obscure numbers. There would be no clichéd versions of “Got My Mojo Working” or “Smokestack Lightning” here. The Stones, befitting the blues aficionados they are, dug a little deeper. The only well-known song on here to the average rock music fan is “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” once covered by Led Zeppelin.

What’s particularly striking about Blue and Lonesome is how comfortable the band sounds. As on A Bigger Bang, the Stones are stripped down here, with only a little outside help on piano and keyboards, and a couple of stinging electric guitar leads from Eric Clapton. Mick Jagger doesn’t play any guitar on the album, for the first time in 30 years, concentrating instead on some of his best vocals in years and his magnificent harmonica playing. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood provide stellar backing throughout the album, drawing the blues around them like a comfortable old blanket. Charlie Watts is similarly clearly in his element here.

The songs are well-chosen, with covers ranging from Little Walter (“Blue and Lonesome”, “I Gotta Go” and “Hate To See You Go”) to Willie Dixon (“Just Like I Treat You” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby”). There is a certain sameness to the songs given that they are all traditional blues songs, the album was recorded in just three days, the instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, and harmonica) is the same throughout, and there are no original songs. However, at a brisk 42 minutes, the album doesn’t overstay its welcome as every Stones album since Steel Wheels has. This, plus the sequencing of the album alternating slow blues songs with faster jump blues, is the key to keeping Blue and Lonesome from becoming dull.

Of particular note on the album are the two songs featuring Eric Clapton. On Little Johnny Taylor’s “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” Clapton channels his fellow Domino, laying down some spectacular Duane Allman-ish slide and a solo that harkens back to his days as a Bluesbreaker. On “I Can’t Quit You Baby” he claws back Otis Rush’s original from the bombastic version that Led Zeppelin unleashed on an unsuspecting public. The version on Blue and Lonesome is true to the sound of the original, and Clapton’s solos stand in direct contrast to Jimmy Page’s. Clapton plays to the song here, and his solos are no less ferocious for it. Jagger whoops in appreciation in the background, sounding remarkably like a man half his age.

The blues was never that far away from The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World, but it’s a real treat hearing them fully embrace it in a way they haven’t since their earliest days as England’s newest hitmakers. The album does suffer a bit from a lack of original songs and a certain sameness of sound, but this is a pretty stellar late-career move from rock’s original bad boys.

Grade: B+

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The Beatles: Past Masters

Past Masters by the BeatlesIt’s almost impossible to believe, yet it remains true: You can compile a multi-disc Greatest Hits of the Beatles without including a single song from any of their albums. Such is the case with Past Masters, the collected singles, EPs, B-sides, and random tracks that never made it onto the band’s proper LPs. Most of the songs included did appear on the American versions of their albums, which cannibalized their singles to appear as hooks for the record buyer, but those LPs were creations of Capitol Records, not the band. The Beatles, and they were not the only act to have this opinion, believed that if you included singles on LPs you were ripping off the fans by getting them to buy the same music twice. It was really quite common in the mid-Sixties for an English band’s albums to be remarkably different than their American releases.

The Beatles, however, were a cut above. They were so prolific that they were churning out singles and EPs every couple of months, with a yearly (or sometimes twice yearly) LP release. Their musical output, driven by an insatiable demand, dwarfed the rest of the music scene by a large margin. Not only were they putting out a seemingly endless stream of new music, they were doing so at an astonishingly high level of quality. It was truly as if they didn’t want to be associated with anything mediocre or worse.

The singles, and the Past Masters collection, begins with “Love Me Do,” their moderately successful first single from 1962. Unbeknownst to most fans at the time, and even today, the single was a different version than the album track. The “Love Me Do” that appears on the Please Please Me album doesn’t feature Ringo Starr on drums. After the Pete Best debacle, George Martin brought in a professional studio drummer named Andy White to play instead of the unproven Ringo, who was relegated to tambourine. The version on Past Masters is the single version of the song, with Ringo on drums. It is, of course, a charming pop song circa the early Sixties (ironically, the pre-Beatles Sixties). There’s nothing much to the song except some nice harmonica and a good vocal hook. The lyrics are pretty bad, the instrumentation simple. There was no hint of what was to come.

From there Past Masters explodes with a dazzling string of singles from the effervescent “From Me to You” and “Thank You Girl” to the majestic “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” These last two songs, and their B-sides, “I’ll Get You” and the extraordinary harmonies of “This Boy,” are where the Beatle legend, and true Beatlemania, begins. “She Loves You” is the first Beatles track to use the trick of starting the song with the chorus, an instant ear worm that grabs the listener from the first seconds and demands full attention be paid. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” co-written by Lennon and McCartney in the basement of Paul’s girlfriend’s (Jane Asher) house was the shot heard around the world, especially in America where it soared to the top of the charts and took up residence there until it was replaced by an American reissue of “She Loves You.” Released in America just before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” caught fire in the weeks following that national tragedy. The timing couldn’t have been better. When America was reeling and mourning, a propulsive song filled with the joy and wonder of new romance exploded onto the airwaves. Thousands of people lined up at the newly rechristened John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to welcome the long-haired lads from Liverpool. America was the last great step for the Beatles to assume musical world dominance.

Those two singles are followed on Past Masters by “Komm Gibb Mir Deine Hand” and “Sie Liebt Dich,” which featured the band singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” in German, done to recognize their fans in Germany, the first country where the Beatles began to really make a name for themselves. It was released as a single in Germany.

In England, the band released an EP called Long Tall Sally. Since there was no market for EPs in America, these songs were processed as album tracks on a “new” unauthorized American-only album. Paul McCartney’s frenetic take on Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” plus covers of “Slow Down” and “Matchbox” and the sole Lennon-McCartney track, the excellent “I Call Your Name” comprised the EP.

The band closed out 1964 with one of their best early singles, “I Feel Fine” backed with “She’s A Woman.” Both songs are fine rockers, the former one of the first (if not the first) songs to feature guitar feedback on record. Before Jeff Beck’s “Shapes of Things,” before Pete Townshend’s “My Generation,” and long before Jimi Hendrix turned feedback into art, John Lennon’s song starts with a single guitar note followed by a blast of feedback. The song ends with dogs barking very faintly in the fade-out. “She’s A Woman” is Paul’s contribution, featuring one of his best early vocals.

“Bad Boy,” a racing cover of a Larry Williams song, was included on the American-only Beatles VI in early 1965. That’s correct. In the span of 1964 Capitol Records had milked the Beatles three official albums (With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, and Beatles for Sale), combined with the Long Tall Sally EP and the singles to release five albums in America. “Bad Boy” was really sort of the exception. It was released only in America until it turned up on a British greatest hits album (A Collection of Oldies But Goldies).

The first disc of Past Masters closes with two B-sides, the soaring “Yes It Is” which was the flip side of “Ticket To Ride” and the breakneck “plastic soul” of “I’m Down,” the flip of “Help!” “I’m Down” was never released on an album, even in England, and remained a lost track until it resurfaced in the 1970s on the Rock and Roll Music compilation. It remains a criminally unknown song, featuring one of Paul’s best vocals ever, wherein he beats his idol Little Richard at his own game.

The second disc of Past Masters also aligns neatly with the sudden maturity exhibited by the band. The early Beatles are now done and locked in the history books. Disc two begins with 1966’s “Day Tripper”/”We Can Work It Out” followed by one of the greatest singles of all time, “Paperback Writer”/”Rain”. While “We Can Work It Out” contained much of McCartney’s trademark sunny optimism, it’s tempered by Lennon’s bridge, which reminds the listener that “life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting”. But it’s “Day Tripper” that ushers in a newer, heavier sound. Featuring a riff that Jimi Hendrix loved, and a lyric that’s simultaneously about drugs (in this case, LSD) and a very, um, frustrating woman (“she’s a big teaser/she took me half the way there” isn’t particularly subtle innuendo). “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” upped the ante, with both sides of the single being blasts of loud guitars and even louder bass from McCartney, heavily influenced by Motown savant Funk Brother James Jamerson. The production on these two songs is absolutely pristine. Despite the wall-of-sound nature of the songs, every instrument can be heard as clearly as if the band was standing in the room with you. Paul’s bass on “Rain” is particularly prominent and particularly good. It’s one of the great bass guitar recordings in rock and likely the first where that rhythm instrument is so loud in the mix, almost assuming lead duties. “Rain” also gets the nod for having the first backwards vocals on a pop or rock record.

In 1967 the Beatles singles were added to the English Magical Mystery Tour EP to create the album of the same name. This was the last time Capitol Records would rearrange the band’s output to make a few extra bucks. Since then, the American album Magical Mystery Tour has become so loved it was made canon in 1987 with the arrival of the Beatles on CD. As a result of that move, Past Masters does not include what were originally released as singles only: “Strawberry Fields Forever”/”Penny Lane”, “All You Need Is Love”/”Baby You’re A Rich Man” and “Hello, Goodbye” the A-side of “I Am the Walrus.”

The collection picks up again in 1968 with “Lady Madonna”/”The Inner Light”. The A-side is a rollicking, piano-pounding, Fats Domino-inspired number. The latter is one of George’s India-influenced sitar songs. “The Inner Light” has never been released on a Beatles album with the exception of Rarities in 1980. It’s a (mercifully) brief song that at least includes a backing vocal from John and Paul, a rarity on George’s India songs.

As good as “Lady Madonna” was, it held no comparison to the genius run of singles the Beatles had released since “Day Tripper” that included “Strawberry Fields,” “Penny Lane” and “I Am the Walrus” among others. The band had an ace up their sleeve with the next single, a song written by Paul as consolation for John’s son, Julian, as his parents were getting divorced. “Hey Jude” ended up being the most successful single the Beatles ever released, but in some ways that’s surprising. At the time it was the longest song ever released as a single, beating Dylan’s trailblazing “Like A Rolling Stone” by a full minute. The Beatles felt confident releasing such a long song (over seven minutes) because they knew there was no way the radio wouldn’t play it. Another reason its hit status was surprising is that the last four minutes of the song are given over to a mostly wordless chorus comprised of the band singing “Na na na na na na na hey Jude” over and over again. Not exactly hit material, that. What saves the fadeout from being boring is McCartney’s howling vocal interjections done in his best Little Richard voice while the music, complete with a 36-piece orchestra, builds inexorably around him. That’s hit material.

In the late summer of 1968 “Hey Jude” was pouring out of radio stations and jukeboxes everywhere, slamming into the number one slot and staying there for several weeks. Equally outstanding was the B-side, “Revolution.” This was the first time the Beatles were explicitly political in a song at a time when the New Left was rising in both America and Britain, and calls for revolution were dominating in political songs. Of course, the Beatles did it differently by making “Revolution” a song that was directly opposed to the rhetoric coming out of organizations like the Black Panthers and bands like Jefferson Airplane. “But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out,” John sings over a wall of heavy, distorted guitars. Lennon did want it both ways, however. In both the video for the song and the slower, more acoustic version recorded for the White Album, he changes the lyric to “count me out…in.”

The band was fraying around the edges at this point in their career. In January of 1969, less than two months after the release of their 30-song self-titled opus, the band was back in the studio. Under enormous pressure to write and record a new album and then do a single live show, the fraying got worse. George Harrison even quit at one point (memorializing the moment in his diary by writing “left the Beatles.”) George was back a few days later, and the band continued. There were some great ideas for songs floating around, but they simply couldn’t seem to get it together to bring the ideas to their full potential. The exception was their next single, “Get Back”/”Don’t Let Me Down.” The latter song was brought to the sessions by John, a heart-rending plea from a very insecure man to his new lover. The A-side of the single was created completely in the studio. There is a part in Peter Jackson’s extraordinary documentary look at these session, Get Back, where McCartney is heard playing around on guitar. The chords he’s riffing on have no words attached and are sort of formless, but gradually they begin to take shape and McCartney begins extemporizing mostly nonsense lyrics. It’s a fascinating process watching the song “Get Back” being written right before your eyes. The single was released in April of 1969, after the Beatles had given up recording the album they’d started in January. The version of “Get Back” that appears on Past Masters is a completely different mix than the version that would eventually appear on the album Let It Be.

The next single reflected where the Beatles were at that moment. Released only one month after “Get Back”, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”/”Old Brown Shoe” features a Ringo-less band. Since Ringo was taking some time away to work on the Peter Sellers film “The Magic Christian,” George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe” was recorded with McCartney on drums. The real question is, “Who plays bass?” The song features a very McCartney-esque bass line but George always maintained that it was he who played the bass. My money’s on McCartney. The galloping bass line is too loud, too busy without being overwhelming. Harrison was a fine guitarist, but there’s nothing in his entire recorded output that suggests he could play the bass in a fashion even approximating his Beatle bandmate, one of the best bass players in the rock era. George sings and plays guitar and organ on the track, with John on piano.

Similarly, “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” was completed without the missing Ringo but also without George. Written and recorded in one day, this was the last Beatles song to be done exclusively for a single and features John on vocals and guitar and Paul on bass, drums, and vocals. The song is far from being a ballad. It’s a brisk rocker that tells the story of John and Yoko’s wedding and subsequent honeymoon with all of Lennon’s trademark wit and humor. Paul’s drumming is particularly good. As Beatle singles go, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”/”Old Brown Shoe” is one of their lesser efforts as enjoyable as it might be. It simply doesn’t stand up against any of the singles they’d released since “She Loves You” started their run of genius work. Still, it’s a fun couple of songs.

The next Beatles single was not actually released by the band. “Across the Universe” was a song John had given to the World Wildlife Fund for a charity album called No One’s Gonna Change My World. It’s largely a throwaway collection of songs featuring The Beatles, the Hollies, and assorted C-list and D-list acts, which makes “Across the Universe” shine even brighter. Marrying one of Lennon’s best ever lyrics to a gorgeous melody, and overdubbed with the sound of a flock of birds, this is a remarkably different, and better, song than the one that appears on the album Let It Be. The song was recorded in early 1968 and was originally considered to be the B-side to “Lady Madonna” but was shelved until Lennon gave it away.

The Beatles broke up in April of 1970, when a staggeringly passive-aggressive McCartney released a phony interview where he told the world that he didn’t see working with John ever again. One month prior, the Beatles sent their parting shot to the music world with the release of the single “Let It Be”/”You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” The A-side really requires no explanation. It’s a very different mix than the one that would show up two months later on the album of the same name. The overdubs are largely absent and the guitar solo is wildly different. The B-side, however, was…something else entirely. The basic track was originally recorded in 1967, and included The Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones playing a saxophone. Vocals were added in April of 1969. The entire song is an extended joke, with John and Paul using funny voices mostly repeating the titular phrase over disjointed music. It’s not something most Beatle fans listen to on repeat. It’s not even something that most Beatle fans have even heard. It is, however, a wonderfully idiosyncratic, humorous goof that reminds the listeners that the Beatles were, above all, fun.

From October 1962 to March 1970, just seven and a half years, the Beatles released a mind-blowing 33 songs that did not appear anywhere on their officially released albums. Compiled here on Past Masters they are an easy-to-follow roadmap for the astounding leaps in maturity, creativity, and musical genius the band displayed. It’s almost impossible to believe that the band that released “Love Me Do” was the same band that released “Strawberry Fields” just four and a half years later, and then “Hey Jude” just a year and a half after that. The musical growth of the Beatles was off-the-charts, and unmatched by any band before or since. The best example of this growth is heard here, in the singles collected on Past Masters.

Grade: A+

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Alive, Again—Pearl Jam, Dark Matter

It’s easy to forget these days, 33 years after Ten introduced Pearl Jam to the world, just how much new music from them was anticipated. When their sophomore album, Vs., was released it broke all sales records for the first week of any release. But as with anything, familiarity breeds a certain level of contempt. Pearl Jam’s star is faded now, a totally expected reality in a day when rock music is all but dead and the band has assumed the status of “elder statesmen.” In an odd way, their current level of popularity is likely what the band hoped for before Ten was released, and what they wished for after that album turned them into multi-platinum, voice-of-a-generation, icons. The insane levels of fame the band achieved never sat well with the members, especially their guiding light Eddie Vedder, who would probably be just as happy selling albums out of the trunk of his car. They didn’t want to be bigger than the Beatles; they only wanted to be as big as Fugazi.

Pearl Jam’s reputation was carried on the back of their concert performances. They are one of the most exciting bands to ever take the stage. Their studio output, strikingly consistent, now sells a fraction of what those early albums sold and there’s no question the band has settled into their status as rock legends with nothing particularly new to say. Since 1998’s Yield, an album many (not me) consider to be their finest, they’ve released a string of good albums that would never, and could never, fire up a new audience like Ten, Vs., and Vitalogy did three decades ago. Binaural, Riot Act, the fun but lightweight Backspacer, the tepid and boring Lightning Bolt, and the experimental but uneven Gigaton all had their moments of greatness, but the band frequently sounded like they were going through the motions. Only on their criminally underappreciated eponymous 2006 album did the band show their old fire on any sort of consistent basis. The Pearl Jam album stands with their best work.

Now in 2024 comes another new album, Dark Matter. The album was hyped by the band with Vedder calling it “the best we’ve ever done” and guitar god Mike McCready extolling the virtues of the band’s new heavier (!) rock.

So is it the best, heaviest record they’ve ever done? Nope. Does that mean it’s not good? Also, nope. In fact, Dark Matter is the best album the band has put out since 2006, when the war in Iraq fired up Vedder’s righteous indignation and inspired some of the band’s most ferocious playing. The new album is far less political and more personal, though politics does enter the mix at times (fortunately not in the ham-fisted way it did on Gigaton).

Musically the stars of the show on this album are guitarist Mike McCready, whose revved-up solos are among the best he’s ever done, and drummer Matt Cameron. Apparently the guys in Pearl Jam pressured Cameron to really cut loose on this album, to play like he used to in Soundgarden, and the drummer responded. Dark Matter contains much of Cameron’s finest work, his best work with Pearl Jam, and is one of the great drum recordings of the rock era. He always tended to get a little lost in the shuffle of great drummers who came out of the alternative rock scene because Soundgarden was always something of a faceless band with the exception of Chris Cornell. Dark Matter is the definitive proof that Cameron is right up at the pinnacle of great drummers from Keith Moon and Ginger Baker to Dave Grohl and Jimmy Chamberlain. Throughout Dark Matter, Cameron swings like the great jazz drummers, plays fills like Ringo after a shot of speed, and pounds like Bonham. It’s never less than a thrilling performance.

From the outset, a pair of adrenalin-fueled propulsive rockers named “Scared of Fear” and “React, Respond” the mission statement of the album is evident. This is Pearl Jam as God intended them to be. The experimentation with different textures and rhythms from Gigaton is gone, and the band has clearly woken from the slumber in which they recorded Lightning Bolt. In their place is the fast-paced, stripped down sound of Vs., mixed with the adult songcraft of Yield. In short, Pearl Jam is still alive.

The intensity drops a few notches with “Wreckage”, which bears a passing resemblance to Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly” before picking up again with the title track. “Dark Matter” may not be the fastest or punkiest track on the album, but it is certainly the heaviest. Matt Cameron provides a rock-solid anchor mixed with ridiculously fast fills as Mike McCready and Stone Gossard play slab-of-granite riffs and Eddie Vedder summons all his considerable passion into the vocal.

Throughout the album Pearl Jam isn’t afraid to embrace the contradictions that made them such an exciting and intriguing band from the beginning. Whether it’s arena-ready mid-tempo rock (“Won’t Tell”), sped-up punk (“Running”), acoustic-based rock ballads (“Setting Sun”), Who-ish ravers (“Got To Give”), or catchy pop (“Something Special”), they deliver some of the best songs they’ve done in their lengthy career. Best of all is “Upper Hand,” a nearly six-minute track that begins like a U2 outtake from The Joshua Tree, settles in to a beautiful ballad that features Vedder’s best vocal on the album, and then inexorably builds until it explodes into a volcanic McCready guitar solo.

Producer (and credited co-songwriter) Andrew Watt is a Pearl Jam fan who seems to be specializing in giving a boost to rock bands that have been showing their age (he also produced the latest Rolling Stones album, Hackney Diamonds, their best in decades). The album was written and recorded in just three weeks which tells me the key to the success of Dark Matter is that Watt didn’t give the band time to overthink things, unlike the previous two albums. The result is a late-era Pearl Jam album that hangs comfortably with their 1990’s prime releases.

Grade: A