The Pearl Jam album they said would never be a classic: “We should have gotten more”
Most artists have to be honest with themselves when it comes to the best pieces of their catalogue. As much as people might like to celebrate every new album as a bold new shift in direction or a turning point in their career, there are only so many times someone can talk up their material before sounding like a broken record. But for a band as omnipresent in rock and roll as Pearl Jam, they were always candid about moments when the music suffered behind the scenes.
Because before they even had a proper album to their name, Eddie Vedder was already becoming critical of what they were putting out. Ten launched them into the stratosphere and gave them the kind of hits that most people would dream of, but as soon as he heard the record, it had every single piece of stadium rock production that he hated about hair metal, which led to him wanting to disown the entire project.
It didn’t get much better on their later records, either. It was much easier for Vedder to take over production and songwriting duties on albums like Vitalogy, but things had become so tense in the studio by the time of No Code that Jeff Ament almost quit in protest after not being invited to the album sessions until halfway through.
But by the time they started working in the 2000s, they had seemed to shed every piece of grunge from their DNA. For the next few years, they almost seemed closer to an art rock band from the tricks they were pulling off, and Binaural was the purest expression of that sentiment, working with Tchad Blake to create a completely different way of working.
While everyone may have loved the idea of the record at the time, Stone Gossard said that the band were never going to look back fondly on the results, saying, “We weren’t as loose with one another or sharing as well as we usually did. It was our first record with Matt Cameron. He’s a genius, one of the heaviest drummers of all time. It feels like we should have gotten more out of him… We’re never going to remember that record as one of the greats.”
But that’s hardly fair to the record itself. Yes, they were in a state of transition most of the time, but a lot of the best songs stand out perfectly well. There are admittedly a few songs that don’t work like Vedder’s ‘Soon Forget’, but the experimental parts of the record usually are where it shines, like bringing together strange stringed instruments on ‘Of the Girl’ or going into Pink Floyd territory on ‘Nothing As It Seems’.
Granted, the band’s gripes might also be because they didn’t go the distance the way they wanted to. There are pieces of the album that use the binaural technique, but since it’s only on a select few songs, it’s hard to feel like the album is settling on a theme throughout the record. Then again, there’s nothing wrong with a couple of great songs thrown together on an album.
Not every one of Pearl Jam’s albums needed to be some grandiose statement, and while Binaural is by far one of the most downtempo albums the band ever recorded, it’s also a clinic on how to write a slow burn. And given that they had spent many of their early years trying to be as aggressive as possible, this is like listening to the inverse of an album like Vs. It’s not the easiest to take in, but every band needs that balance in their discography.
