Nobody really claims the band’s most recent albums are their best, but there’s a pretty noticeable divergence amongst critics who dig their back-to-basics approach, and those who have yawned their way through the last three albums. Some entirely dismiss anything that happened roughly ’95-’02, some argue those mid-era Pearl Jam works are wrongfully sidelined in the ’90s alt-rock narrative. Every fan knows the experience of talking to someone who goes, “Oh, they’re still around? I remember that one song they did…” before said person breaks into some ridiculous impression of the chorus from “Jeremy.” (Or maybe that was just me and a high school gym teacher, but I’ve got to imagine this is a semi-frequent phenomenon.) And even with them now falling outside of a lot of people’s attention spans, they’re still a quantifiably “big” band, between their ease at selling out arenas and the fact that their albums still move a respectable amount of copies (especially for a rock band in 2013, even if the numbers pale in comparison to their commercial peak twenty years ago).Īll of this means that there’s a predictable rhythm to what critics will write upon the release of a new Pearl Jam album. They entered the scene as one of the biggest bands in the world, and after a few years vanished from the mainstream audience radar, even though they continued, and still continue, to be an absolutely monolithic touring entity.
Pearl Jam’s status as an artist can be a hard one to quantify.
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