‘Ten’, as we know now, was something of an aberration. For sure Pearl Jam had the innate talent to repeat it, but the desire to spread and experiment was always foremost in their minds and history has shown that the success of ‘Ten’ led the band to recoil, regroup and flex their creative muscles. ‘Vs’ began that endeavour and it proved to be a darker, leaner set – the song’s veering from the brooding, bleak indifference to the splenetic ‘leash’ but Pearl Jam truly turned a corner when they released the underrated, misunderstood ‘Vitalogy’ in 1994 just a few months after Kurt Cobain ended it all with a shotgun and as ‘grunge’ as a buzz-word was already rapidly fading into obscurity.
First released on vinyl (it was, after all, the album that had a song explicitly dedicated to it) the album has endured far beyond the meagre ratings critics were prepared to give it at the time and repeated live exposure to several of its key tracks (especially ‘nothingman’, ‘corduroy’ and ‘better man’) has rendered it an essential addition to any Pearl Jam collection despite its initially hard-to-penetrate atmosphere of obtuse melancholy. Here we find it re-pressed and re-mastered, not to mention lovingly reproduced in all its packaging glory, as part of the ongoing celebrations of the band’s twentieth anniversary and it is thus time to drop the needle once again onto this most beguiling slab of vinyl.
I remember owning this the first time round, on tape as it happens, and being entranced by a booklet which went beyond the usual lyrics/grainy band photo collection to offer something interesting and worth spending time studying. A bizarre, and frequently funny, collection of period health advice and vintage photos, pleas to then-President Clinton about the behaviour of anti-abortion campaigners and scrawled lyrics, it was the first of several Pearl Jam albums to experiment with original and inventive packaging ideas and happily it has been reproduced in full for this vinyl edition. Open the heavy-duty gatefold cover to reveal a full size picture of the band (by the time of recording barely on speaking terms) lounging in their rehearsal space and beyond that you have the booklet – reprinted full LP size and just as interesting, different and inspirational as the music it represents. It’s good to see a noted band’s back catalogue treated with such care and respect and it bodes well should the strangely beautiful ‘No code’ be re-issued.
Of course packaging can only augment a good record, it can’t salvage a bad one (to paraphrase a friend of mine) but Pearl Jam’s ‘Vitalogy’ is a good record, if a strange one and it has much to offer particularly as this edition has been specially and specifically re-mastered for vinyl. Now remastering has received much attention of late, particularly among audio purists who fear (often correctly) that the process does little more than compress the range and raise the volume of older music. This is certainly not true in this instance as this release has been specifically worked for analogue sound reproduction, the result being that this is the clearest representation yet of Vitalogy’s lo-fi, scratchy sound, offering plenty of warmth amidst the raw grit of the guitars and allowing Eddie Vedder’s voice to shine. The opening barrage of ‘last exit’, with its hard hitting, incessant rhythm and jarring guitars, and the frantic punk, slash and burn of ‘spin the black circle’ (especially apt when played on a turntable) sound brilliant – defiant yet fragile, and for as much as the latter track is an ode to the virtues of vinyl, Eddie makes it sound like his life depends upon the lyrical content. Things only really settle down for the gently throbbing ‘not for you’ with Eddie intoning “restless souls, enjoy your youth…” over a backdrop that is positively demure compared to the pyrotechnics of ‘ten’. The final track on side one is the enigmatic ‘tremor Christ’, another song that initially seems thin when compared to the glossy sheen of Pearl jam’s much vaunted debut, but which slowly seeps into the consciousness, only to surface in your mind at various intervals demanding that you dig out the record once more after a suitable distancing. Like so much of ‘Vitalogy’ it’s a slow burning song that improves exponentially with age and which, returning to it now, has garnered a haunting grandeur that was not necessarily apparent on first listen.
Side two opens with one of Pearl Jam’s best loved hits, the beautiful ‘nothingman’ about which nothing more really needs to be said, suffice it to say that it is a stunning ballad that remains show-stopping to this day. ‘Whipping’ shifts the ground from under your feet with another punk blast which sounds positively brutal after its genteel predecessor, whilst ‘pry, to’ with its self-consciously art-rock musical back drop and repeated lyric of “p-r-i-v-a-c-y is priceless to me” shows that the fame was getting to Eddie in more ways than one. Perhaps the least engaging song on the album, it is, nonetheless, a short step to the quite excellent ‘corduroy’, which closes out the side and which the band used to open many of the shows on the ensuing tour due to its slow-burning start and vital, driving central riff.
…And this is when things get weird. It goes against the critical grain, but I have always really liked Side three’s opening gambit ‘bugs’. A bizarre monologue set to accordion, ‘bugs’ indicates that Eddie’s sanity was potentially hanging by the thinnest of threads and yet he still maintained that quirky sense of humour that made him such a consistently interesting front man, although there are plenty of PJ fans who would like to have seen it scrubbed from the album. ‘Satan’s bed’ is anther frenetic rocker that gets the momentum back but which is less successful than ‘spin the black circle’s’ frantic release before the band perform an abrupt u-turn and unveil the scintillating counterpart to ‘nothingman’ in the form of ‘betterman’, a song that is sung by audiences the world over with lung-busting volume during live shows. Clearly unwilling to end on too straight-forward a note, the side closes with the strangely tribal rhythm of ‘aye davanita’ leaving us with a side of vinyl and two songs left to go.
Side Four opens with a song that is strangely rarely mentioned when the subject of ‘vitalogy’ is broached – the brilliant ‘immortality’, a slow burning track that combines Eddies typically obtuse lyrics with one of Pearl Jam’s very best pieces of music. Slow to start, it combines a world-weary verse with a crunching bridge section and soaring finale that is surely one of the most underrated pieces in Pearl Jam’s back catalogue and it provides a fitting close to the album proper, with the oddly titled and slightly jarring sound collage of ‘stupid mop’ (also titled ‘heyfoxymophandleladythatsme’) creating a creepy atmosphere with its sampled recordings of mental patients suggesting that the band, burnt out and in need of a break, had finally had enough. It would be two years before Pearl Jam re-entered the studio to record ‘No Code’ and even that, arguably, was not enough time to truly digest the myriad secrets that ‘Vitalogy’ held tightly in its clenched and defiant fist.
Overall this is a worthy re-issue of an album that has never truly been appreciated in the manner which it deserves. Harder to follow, darker than its two predecessors and cloaked in metaphor and myth, it’s not a record that is easy to love, but given the appropriate time and patience it is surely one of the most rewarding records in Pearl Jam’s extensive back catalogue and remastered here with audiophile sound, on pristine, black, 180 grm vinyl, this is the best way yet to enjoy this underrated gem.
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