Pearl Jam - Ten (Legacy Edition) Review

I’m guessing I wasn’t the only person who felt a slight sinking feeling upon first seeing the full cover art to Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten. After years wondering what the pyramidal thing at the bottom was, I finally bought the record and discovered the sleeve folded out and that the strange shape was the band, locked in a hairy hi-five. And they were wearing shorts. Big shorts.

That Pearl Jam have pretty much repudiated that rock dude image with every single subsequent action and note of music is not really important. The fact is Ten was big with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers crowd, and certainly much about it is about as underground as a corporate jet. It's a ponderous avalanche of big emotions and big guitars that probably includes the least grunge moment ever, namely the point on ‘Even Flow’ where Eddie Vedder growls “let me introduce you to Michael”, provoking a bout of axe wibbling from the duly invoked Mike McCready....full text For the twentieth anniversary of their debut Ten - an event that arrives in 2011 and is being celebrated in 2009, but who's counting? - Pearl Jam went all out and delivered not one but three reissues, all in increasing levels of lavishness. First off is a standard two-CD set, followed by a triple-disc set that adds a DVD of the band's 1992 performance for MTV Unplugged and then there's a gargantuan, frankly ludicrous, collectors edition that has all that plus four slabs of vinyl containing the two mixes of the album plus a '92 live show, one cassette that replicates the original demo Eddie Vedder turned in as his audition and assorted memorabilia that retails for two hundred dollars. All this commotion camouflages the real noteworthy aspect of this anniversary edition: Pearl Jam brought in their longtime producer Brendan O'Brien to remix Ten from the ground up, to strip away the studio affectations of producer Rick Parashar and mixer Tim Palmer that made it a bright, shiny anomaly during the dingy heyday of grunge and make the album sound more liked the rest of the band's work (which O'Brien produced, after all). This isn't fullscale cultural revisionism on the order of George Lucas - the original album is preserved in remastered form on the first disc - nor is it akin to the massive reworking of Raw Power that took liberties with the aesthetics of a classic, altering some crucial reasons why it was influential, but rather like a directors cut that's designed to be closer to the artist's original intentions...full text On March 24, Pearl Jam re-releases their debut album "Ten", one of my personal all time favorite albums. It is part of a 2 year re-issuing of their entire studio release catalogue that will end in 2011 to coincide with their 20th anniversary. Listening to this album sounds just as fresh when it first came out and definitely still holds up to any of today's fare,...full text