Cutting Holes In The Clouds

Pearl Jam “Waiting for Stevie”

I’m of two minds about Andrew Watt’s involvement in Pearl Jam’s new record Dark Matter as producer and co-writer. On the one hand, I have yet to be impressed by Watt and find that his collaborations with much older legend-status acts like Ozzy Osbourne, The Rolling Stones, and now both Eddie Vedder solo and Pearl Jam feels like the human equivalent of training an AI on those artists’ material. You don’t get new ideas from a Watt production, you just get something closer to the average listener’s expectations of the artist he’s producing. Watt is a fan surrogate, and I think he’s attractive to major labels who want to get the most commercial potential out of their legacy acts and a flattering presence for artists, who get to work with someone rather worshipful who truly believes in them. It makes sense, but in the case of the Stones it’s notable that the songs on Hackney Diamonds that feel the most rote and formulaic have Watt songwriting credits and the one song that actually captures the band’s specific magic is a pure Jagger/Richards composition.

On the other hand, I was listening to Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament talk about the process of making the album with Watt on Broken Record and it was obvious how much the young producer had done to shake them out of exhausted creative patterns and push them back to more of a full-band collaboration. Gossard in particular sounded like he needed Watt’s enthusiastic confidence in him as a guitarist to get hyped up.

I think their previous album Gigaton is much better album and definitely their best record released after the 90s, but I can see how the process of making that one was more labored and less enjoyable. But on that record I could feel them pushing themselves, and Dark Matter sounds like them writing new iterations of stock Pearl Jam songs, and what I mean by that would be apparent if you flick through every album from Yield onward, which is effectively the same sort of songs sequenced in basically the same way over and over. They can’t capture the magic of Ten or Vs again, but they sure as hell can rewrite Yield forever.

OK, slight backtrack: “Waiting for Stevie” actually does get some of the old Ten magic, if just by pushing the band members towards strengths I think they’ve backed away from to some extent for fear of being too repetitive or veering into self-parody. Vedder’s voice is huge on this song, going full-anthem mode after years of a lot of semi-anthem mode. The main riff resembles Gossard’s parts on both “Black” and “In Hiding,” while the climax and outro brings Mike McCready back to end-of-“Alive” territory. This is indeed exactly what people think Pearl Jam sounds like, but in the best, most reverent way. If anything they’re trying to go bigger than ever here, and borrowing tricks from Soundgarden and Jane’s Addiction to get this song properly mountain-sized. I’m not crazy about the mix – it gets a little too tinny and I’d prefer a more pronounced bass sound like you get on “Breath,” but this is Pearl Jam: there will be dozens of looser, and more probably more energetic live recordings, assuming they don’t give up on it early because they already have to play “Alive” at every show and maybe this is just too similar in function?

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