I gotta say it now, better loud than too late

Pearl Jam’s ninth album, Backspacer, has been out for a month now but seems to get better every day. It’s a little under thirty-seven minutes of the band at its best.

Turns out the abbreviated running time, my biggest concern before hearing it, is a huge plus. The constraint seems to focus their efforts into a tight and wonderful whole. As on their last album, the entire disc feels coherent, but in this case it feels especially complete, too.

I love the energy of the album, which really takes on two tones: the sharp defiant rock of the first four songs, and the thoughtful persistence that starts with “Just Breathe”. Somehow the two styles complement one another: if you start cranking the first few songs, you won’t feel the need to turn it down when you hit the slower stuff, but if you jump straight into the second half, the same songs somehow feel much calmer. Personally I think I love the second half a little bit more. “Unthought Known” and “Speed of Sound” are the two songs with the highest play counts in my iTunes, if you don’t count “The Fixer”, which I got before the album came out. I really like “Amongst the Waves”, too.

The other awesome part of any Pearl Jam album is hearing it live. I missed their concerts (they finish their U.S. tour in Philly this week) but picked up the CDs of their first night in Seattle. It’s predictably incredible. You can catch a lot of it on YouTube. Really (music starts just before two minutes in). This album is great and I want to listen to it more the more I listen to it. People mock me some times for loving such an old band, but Backspacer proves Pearl Jam is as good as ever.

Why Transformers 2 was so horrible (Spoiler Alert!)

I’ve had two conversations lately about Transformers 2, easily the worst Transformers movie since the animated original. The DVD just came out and one of my friends saw it, and the other discussion took place when a girl complimented my Autobots T-shirt the other day. That’s right, baby! Instead of proposing, I launched into this diatribe.

Transformers: The Movie, not to be confused with Transformers, was the animated film that, in 1986, destroyed my childhood. Why? Because they killed all the freaking Autobots to make way for a new line of toys. (They killed a bunch of Decepticons, too, but honestly, who cares? The Decepticon logo is cool. The concept of Decepticons is cool. But they’re either whiny (Starscream), weak leaders (Megatron) or really unoriginal (Thundercracker, Skywarp, etc.). Soundwave is awesome and I still try to do his voice, but overall it’s a weak crop.)

Anyway, the worst death was Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots and a red-white-and-blue symbol of all that was good in the Cold War ’80s. Optimus Prime was like the John Elway of my childhood. Actually John Elway was the John Elway of my childhood, so call him more of a Robot John Elway, which sounds awesome and like he could probably play forever. Like I was saying, anyway, they just up and killed Prime and broke my heart but good. Well, actually it didn’t break my heart at all, I just thought it made the movie suck. When you’re a kid, no one cares if you spoil the movie, and by the time we got around to renting it I already knew a) Optimus was gonna die and b) Ultra Magnus was gonna cuss. But why kill O-Prime? He’s the hero. Does Peter Parker die during the opening scene of Spider-Man 3? Lots of people in my generation look back on this movie fondly and all of them are, without exception, complete idiots. The movie’s garbage, I hate the kids’ movie storyline about some brash young pup (Hot Rod) becoming the next leader, and anyone who disagrees with me is a communist.

Well, I’m already tired of building up to this pile of suck, so for those of you I warned never to see 2, here’s the problem with it: they killed Optimus again. Seriously. Halfway through the movie he finds himself in a huge forest battle with a bunch of Decepticons, and he’s rocking, and beating the crap out of evil space robots left and right. And then one of them stabs him through the back and he’s dead. That’s it.

Well, that’s not it, because they keep dropping hints that only a Prime can defeat this enemy, and for some reason they keep alluding to the location of Optimus’ body, and eventually you’re like, hmmm, I wonder if he comes back to life. Well, I’d really love to spoil it for you, and he does come back. Stupid! Stupid! Don’t make me sit there shaking in rage for several minutes, wondering how I could have been so foolish as to waste my money on a ticket.

Also, like how Mike Shanahan would script the first fifteen plays of any Broncos game, it feels like Michael Bay scripts the first fifteen minutes of the movie and then lets his cast of wunderkinds take over. There are tons of lame scenes and characters, but really the death of Optimus is all you need to know about to avoid this forever.