It’s been four years since the release of Pearl Jam’s last studio record, but it’s not like they’ve been far from view. In the interim, we’ve seen reissues of their two best albums (1993’s Vs. and 1994’s Vitalogy), three live collections, a slew of side-project activity, and a 20th-anniversary world tour capped by the release of Cameron Crowe’s documentary Pearl Jam Twenty. As that film illustrated, this band has much to be proud of, having survived sudden success and the attendant media scrutiny, a risky (at the time) rejection of MTV, grueling court battles with Ticketmaster over fair practices, fan backlash over the band’s more politicized gestures, horrible tragedies, and the overall collapse of the music industry with their arena-filling acumen intact.
And yet, even an exhaustive documentary produced by a super-fan like Crowe doesn’t have much to say about the band’s post-millennial output—because there’s really not a lot to say. Pearl Jam ceased long ago to be a band that makes records with any sense of occasion to them: no intriguing backstory, no conceptual constructs to shape the album’s identity, no new contemporary influences that might push them in an unexpected direction. You just get another nine to 13 Pearl Jam songs that—as per the quiet/loud division of 2004 anthology *Rearviewmirror—*can be easily slotted into one of two categories. (Even the tracklist sequences are invariably similar: the second song will be a no-fuss rocker that serves as the single, and the album will inevitably close with a wistfully earnest ballad.) Pearl Jam are arguably the only modern rock band of note that consciously moved away from its formative, hit-making sound—in the period spanning Vitalogy through to 2000’s *Binaural—*but came out the other side an even more traditional, predictable band.
So if you’ve been paying any attention to Pearl Jam’s activities over the past decade, you already know what to expect from Lightning Bolt (and it’s certainly not a tribute to the Rhode Island avant-metal duo of the same name; heck, even the Pink Floyd comparisons bandied about in pre-release interviews seem offbase, unless your conception of Pink Floyd begins and ends with “Mother”). Like 2009’s Backspacer before it (and 2006’s Pearl Jam before it, and 2002’s Riot Act before it), Lightning Bolt begins with a spirited sprint before sputtering out and winding up in dullsville. The feeling of déjà vu is compounded by the strip-mined subject matter, as Eddie Vedder explores familiar themes of family strife and domestic unrest while once again celebrating the therapeutic powers of surfing and listening to music on vinyl.
If Pearl Jam can no longer recapture the sort of hot-wired intensity that once had Vedder stage-diving off festival scaffolding, they can at least still raise an inspired ruckus when the mood strikes: “Mind Your Manners”—a.k.a. “Spin the Black Circle Some More”—reformulates the original grunge cocktail recipe of mid-1970s hard rock and early 80s hardcore, with a chooglin’ intro reminiscent of early KISS deep cut “Parasite” that gets mowed down by a boot-stomping blitzkrieg, which in turn is blindsided by a sublimely melodic middle-eight. And “My Father’s Son” is the rare latter-day Pearl Jam rave-up to put the spotlight on bassist Jeff Ament, whose sense of groove—once the cornerstone of the band’s sound—has been deemphasized by band’s ever-growing propensity for straight-ahead, chug-a-lug rockers.
Despite their punk-schooled principles, Pearl Jam have never been shy about their debt to classic rock, but it’s usually good classic rock: The Who, Crazy Horse, the Stones. And while the upward-arced anthemery of the title track and “Swallowed Whole” continue to dutifully honor this holy trinity, Lightning Bolt also betrays the long-term diluting effects of spending too much time hanging on the right of the dial. “Let the Records Play” is boilerplate, bad-to-the-bone blooze, while the album’s centerpiece ballads tread on odious Lite-FM territory and forcefully tip the scales from poignant to maudlin, whether it’s the Goo Goo Dolls sheen of “Sirens” or the Hornsby-esque piano rolls of the closing “Future Days” (definitely not a Can cover) that made the song a natural fit for the closing sequence of last week’s "Grey’s Anatomy". (By contrast, the countrified lament “Sleeping By Myself” benefits from a lighter touch, thanks to a gleaming George Harrison-style guitar refrain that draws the cheekiness out of the song’s woe-is-me sentiments.) The Pearl Jam mythos as it exists today is undeniably wrapped up in their notoriously epic live shows, wherein the band is famous for loosening up and stretching out, but for whatever reason, that adventurous ethos rarely translates to their increasingly mannered albums. Pearl Jam on record have essentially been reduced to the rock ‘n’ roll version of wearing sweatpants: they’ve given up trying to impress anyone, so they may as well be comfortable.
