Ten out of ten (Ten - Pearl Jam)

Member Name: Fatlad

Product:	Ten - Pearl Jam
Date:	31/07/00 (174 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: All of it

Disadvantages: nothing

The first album from the longest surviving of all the Seattle groups of the early nineties. What makes this truly remarkable is that half the group rose from the ashes of Mother Love Bone after the death of singer Andy Wood, and the other half hadn’t ever met.

Guitarist Stone Gossard had recorded a tape of demos with bass player Jeff Ament and passed them around initially looking for a drummer. The tape made its way into the hands of Jack Irons formerly of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, he declined the stool but recommended a friend of his who was a singer. Enter Eddie Vedder, within weeks he’d moved up to Seattle and they had recorded this amazing debut album. All of happened around the time Seattle was starting to get noticed for other bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden, and the “Grunge” movement was born.

The album itself starts off at a thundering pace with “Once” part of a trilogy of songs telling a story. This song is burning with a barely contained anger that manifests itself in the intensity of the song. With hardly any time to recover you are catapulted into the sonic guitar-fest that is “Even flow”. This song defines the Seattle sound, and is the most “Grunge” Pearl Jam would ever be. It is a great tune about homelessness, which again is delivered with such passion that you wonder if he’s singing from experience. “Alive” is the centrepiece of the whole album, a twin air guitar song that got them noticed as a major force in modern music. The guitar hook at the beginning really grabs you and does what it says, gets you hooked. It is also another of the songs in a story trilogy, the third being a b-side called “Footsteps”. “Alive” is the first song telling of feelings off guilt and resentment, followed by “Once” telling of the effects and how the guilt caused the subject to become a killer, and “Footsteps” says of how t
he man feels when in prison.

“Black” is a beautiful song as anyone will ever write, and shows that a band with so much intensity and passion can manage to slow things down to create something delicate like “Black”. “Jeremy” along with “Alive” is the most famous song here, owing a lot to its catchy intro and bass line, an effect created by using a six string bass guitar showing the band as great innovators as well. Also it won an award for the video at the MTV awards, something which the band did their best to distance themselves from, as it was the last promotional video they ever made.

Overall here is an album that can hold its own with any classic rock album, up there along with the Neverminds and Ok Computers of this world.

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