Gigaton Is Pearl Jam’s Most Adventurous Album in Forever

Pearl Jam fans know the drill by now. Every three or four years, the band’s promotional engine grinds into gear. There’s a new LP on the horizon, maybe a promising single, rumors that it might be the band’s best since Riot Act or what-have-you. You get your hopes up—and then comes another batch of studiously professional, bloodless rockers. The band’s concerts remain sprawling and impassioned spectacles, but its recorded output in recent years has been dismal, razed of the eccentricities that made Vitalogy and No Code so, well, vital. And each time the cycle arrives, the gap between albums is a little longer, the arena audiences are a little grayer, several more of Eddie Vedder’s grunge contemporaries have left us and Nirvana’s catalog’s seems a little more immaculate in retrospect.

This time, something seemed different. For one thing, the gap between Pearl Jam’s 10th album, 2013’s Lightning Bolt, and its 11th stretched to an interminable six-and-a-half years: enough time for the world to fundamentally shift and for a fascist administration to sink its spray-tan tentacles into every spare moment of national consciousness. (Nothing spells “crumbling empire” quite like dropping an album into a global pandemic severe enough to halt your planned arena tour.)

For another, the album was preceded by “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” a deliriously funky first single in which Vedder swaps his copyrighted croon for a paranoid yelp. I don’t know what’s odder—the fact that the song is an uncanny approximation of Fear of Music-era Talking Heads or that Pearl Jam pulls it off. It’s the band’s best and most surprising single in more than a decade, an unexpected stylistic guise from a band that seems to have receded from experimentation soon after it receded from the mainstream eye.

Much of Gigaton lives up to that promise—which is not to say this is Pearl Jam’s long-awaited jittery dance-rock album (no, God no) but that it does contain the band’s most adventurous and engaged material in several presidential administrations. The first four songs alone are a revelation of sustained focus and fury. The ambient hum that opens the record is a red herring, quickly exploding into the punkish snarl of “Who Ever Said.” Next comes “Superblood Wolfmoon,” a ferocious and hooky rocker highlighted by Vedder’s wordless call-and-response scatting and Mike McCready’s Van Halen-esque shredding.

The aforementioned “Dance of the Clairvoyants” crystalizes the album’s nervous energy with a stiff backbeat and some of Vedder’s more surrealist proclamations (“I’m in love with clairvoyants / Cuz they’re out of this world”). And the frantic travelogue “Quick Escape” is highlighted by some industrial-grade guitar machinations and Vedder’s screams in the chorus. Its swaggering intensity is almost comparable to Yield’s “Do the Evolution” or Vitalogy’s “Spin the Black Circle.”