A Year of Dark Matter

Celebrating Pearl Jam’s late-career masterpiece 12 months after release

Last weekend marked the one-year anniversary of Pearl Jam’s latest album. Putting aside some of the more readily obvious marks of sentimentality around it for me - it was the first Pearl Jam album released since I became a father, and so was the first that I was able to share with (force upon?) my kids on release, with Wreckage becoming for a brief and shining moment in time my four-year-old’s favorite song - I am happy to report that, twelve months out the album remains one of their absolute best. This is no small feat for a band over thirty years into their career.

Having now had a chance to listen (and re-listen and re-listen) to the record multiple times in the last twelve months, and having seen a good chunk of the songs live (last year’s tour was the first time I had seen the group in ten years, and this year’s leg will bring them to Atlanta for their first shows here since 2012), I’ve been able to gain perspective on the release not just musically but thematically. I also realized that I never got to opine on the album at length, a grave oversight for a dedicated fan who has a newsletter of his own through which he can pontificate.

Combing Through the Wreckage

Something that stood out immediately upon even the first listen was how many of the songs deal with strained relationships - couples either on the brink or looking back at the ruins of lost love. It’s not necessarily what one immediately expects from a record penned and performed by men in their sixties who are all in happy (for all I know) long-term partnerships. The more I reflected on this however, the more my overall take on the album coalesced and I began to see that its stories of interpersonal strife reflected the larger conflicts within our current moment. Every individual line you can pull out in which Eddie Vedder is singing to someone who has wronged or hurt the narrator (“Stormy seas behind your eyes / The dark moon is setting on your cheap disguise / Whoever said love is a compromise knew you”) can easily be read as if directed at a country that has betrayed its own promises and its own people; a nation for whom half of the population are simply fodder for the other half to enact their various grievances, insecurities, and resentments. This is an album released near the end of the Biden presidency, years removed from the first Trump term and yet mere months out from the second, and it has only proven itself more prescient as we’ve entered our current hellscape.

Sometimes that premonition is refracted through the specific narrative of individual songs, as in the album opening Scared of Fear, which also starts the record with a patented Stone Gossard¹ riff - seemingly simple yet deeply complex:

You’re hurting yourself, it’s plain to see

I think you’re hurting yourself just to hurt me

Or in the ensuing React, Respond:

Are we at war with each other;

Are you at war with yourself?

We could be fighting together

Instead of fighting ourselves

It’s also impossible to listen to the following lyrics from Running, a quick and forceful punk-influenced number built around Jeff Ament’s beastly bass line, and not think of our present social environment:

Lost in a tunnel and the tunnel ain’t no fun

Now I’m lost in all the shit you’re flushing

Sometimes it’s far more direct, perhaps never more so than in the titular track and lead single, which opens with one of the best drum lines Matt (Fucking) Cameron has every written and thunders through a chorus that makes the following resonant observation:

It’s strange, these days

When everybody else pays

For someone else’s mistakes

And sometimes its both, as in the aforementioned Wreckage, which is ostensibly about a relationship in ruins and yet ends with this observation:

Visited by thoughts, not just in the night

That I no longer give a fuck who is wrong and who’s right

It’s a game of winner take all

All means nothing left

Spoils go to the victor

And the others left for dead

Pearl Jam has always been a band that has spoken out forcefully about its social and political beliefs - one of their earliest major TV appearances includes a moment in which Vedder stands on top of his stool during the extended musical bridge on Porch and writes “Pro Choice” on his arm in Sharpie. They released, with Riot Act, what in hindsight may be the greatest pop musical statement about the very specific sense of resigned, weary hopelessness that can set upon you when you see your country eager to enact the same deadly mistakes over and over again. It was during the tour for that album that Vedder’s political performance art, in which he wore a George W Bush mask for a single song critical of the then-current president², drew ire from not just conservatives but the same “respectability” circles and bad-faith media operations that are leading us calmly by the hand to slaughter even now. While the direct anger may have subsided in the decades since (age, parenthood and, let’s face it, millions of dollars tend to add a degree of circumspection), the principles and the fervor have never the less remained. Gigaton, their previous album, directly confronted not just first-term Trump but also the continuing climate crisis. With Dark Matter, though, there is once again a primal immediacy to the songwriting that pairs well with the lyrical metaphors - this is an album that is very much tapped into the zeitgeist of our moment without always needing to comment directly on it.

Swallowed Up By the Sound

The middle stretch of the record offers perhaps its biggest string of surprises - starting with the power-pop rock balladeering of Won’t Tell, its influences equal parts U2 and The Cure, which is followed by what feels like a total reset (apropos since it begins the second side of the vinyl) as Upper Hand fades in with what sounds like a mixture of synth and theremin that is quickly joined by a psychedelia-infused bass and guitars combo that is sonically unlike anything the band has ever composed or performed. Pearl Jam has most often derived their power from direct statement - both lyrically and musically - and Upper Hand feels like a big step forward into more evocative composition, building as it does to each of its choruses before coming back down for the verses and finally erupting in an extended solo/outro - one of many moments in which Mike McCready, a guitar god who nonetheless true to his humble and unassuming nature does some of his best work even when his solos are embedded in the mix and sharing the spotlight with everyone else, cuts loose and absolutely shreds - that takes us straight into the hard-churning main riff of Waiting For Stevie³, which would be the heaviest track on the record if not for Dark Matter itself.

This has been the stretch of the album that has most beguiled and excited me since I first listened, and it’s in part because it represents a band 30-plus years into writing and playing together continuing to stretch themselves and try new things and, even better, those risks paying off unambiguously.

Something Special

A brief word about the most maligned song on the record, an ode from Vedder to his now-grown daughters. Something Special is, plainly put, hopelessly corny and on-the-nose. I’m a fairly big sap in general, so I don’t always mind that, and that’s even more the case now that I am a father and when the song (or anything really) in question is about parenthood. A song by my favorite band, written and sung by an artist who has been so foundational to my development as a person, all about the joys and pains of fatherhood, and hitting so early in that journey for me, was always going to hit me right in the heart. Beyond even that however, there is a fairly resonant and poetic symmetry to that fact that a band that was so literally born from the ashes of broken families and absentee fathers - the first lyrics Vedder ever wrote for the group were for a trio of songs based loosely on his discovery that the man he was raised to think was his dad was not, and that his real father had died before he ever got the chance to know him - has now gotten to the point where they can perform a song that is so open-heartedly about how much they love their kids. The line below chokes me up every time I listen to it:

And if the night grows long, you’re not feeling loved

I will be there and not cause it’s my job

I work for free because you’re both so special

Not only does it resonate for me on its own merits (sue me), but it also calls back directly to one of my favorite lyrics in their whole catalogue, a line that pierces me to the core every time I hear it. The closing track of their debut album, Release, is an improvisation sung by Vedder to the father he never knew. Late in the song comes the following lyric, a line so heavy with yearning on the record and even more so when wailed out into the darkness of a full arena whenever they open their shows with it that it always feels like a spiritual moment, an incantation raised to those who are gone, for everyone we’ve ever lost or never even gotten a chance to know:

I’ll wait up in the dark for you to speak to me

I’ll open up, release me

Vedder has come full circle to the point that he is in effect now the father comforting the younger man who sang that earlier verse. There’s an unavoidable dimension to this and to the sense of loss and separation that pervades the whole record, and its that of all the lead singers of all the major acts to come out of the Seattle scene and hit big in the 90s, Vedder is the last one standing. So many of his peers, his dearest friends, have passed - and all of them in an untimely manner. There is of course a heaviness that comes with that, and likewise a poetry to the fact that Vedder, who so strongly resisted being the voice of a generation 30 years ago, has no choice but to fully embrace that role now since he is in essence the last voice remaining of that generation. Time, perspective, and the balancing influences of a wife and children have no doubt played a large part in getting him to a point where he can not only take on that position successfully but willingly, and even at times joyfully. There was a power that was not lost on me, seeing the band in concert in Portland last May, within the joyous performance of a song like Not for You to an arena full of cheering and dancing fans. Three decades earlier, Vedder sang the same song, an excoriating and intentionally alienating piece about the need for privacy and the desire to cull one’s life of those who would seek to package and own it, with such inward-focused intensity on Saturday Night Live that it felt like a moment too private to even watch; it seemed like he was going to fully implode at any second (the performance was mere weeks after Kurt Cobain had taken his own life). For that same song to become a moment of anthemic inclusion (“Small my table, seats all of you” he sang, a change from the album’s “Seats just two”) was a marker of how far this band has come; that they have managed to make it so far even as those around them have not adds a particularly bittersweet yet moving weight to it all.

Something’s Got to Give

Later on in Got to Give, the penultimate song on the album, comes the following lyric: “Getting to point where I can’t breathe / Getting to the point I’ve nothing to sing/ getting to the point where life don’t mean a thing / Let’s get to the point where we’re all heard and seen / Let’s get to the point we can believe that we are better / together you and me.” I don’t know that I share the band’s confidence that, societally speaking, we can get there - not at the moment, at least - but I’d like to. To me the most resonant lyrics may be the album’s last, which in their own way sum up not only the entire record but the band’s whole career if not the entirety of life itself:

We could become

One last setting sun

Or be the sun at the break of dawn

Let us not fade

I’m not going to be able to come up with a better closing line than that, so why try?

-cs

1. Gossard is most certainly the most underrated rhythm guitarist in the game, and perhaps the most underrated songwriter as well.

2. He would often place the mask over his microphone after that song ended, an act interpreted in ludicrous bad faith by some as a symbolic impalement.

3. Which gets its name from the fact that Vedder and producer Andrew Watt composed the track while (happily and willingly) waiting hours upon hours for Stevie Wonder to join them in the studio for a session on Vedder’s Earthling record.