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.