Pearl Jam - Vs.

7.5 – USA – 1993

When Dave Grohl’s drums kicked in a few seconds into “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Nirvana completely changed music (or, at least, modern rock). Pearl Jam, on the other hand, never got the same cultural cachet as their Seattle counterparts, due in no small part to the lack of a compelling metanarrative like Kurt Cobains meteoric, Icarusian trajectory. However, a case could be made that – musicologically, at least – Pearl Jam were the more influential band.

And I mean that in a bad way. Whereas with one flick of the distortion pedal switch, Nirvana swept away the 80s legacy of hair metal and pop hard rock and ushered in the era of alternative rock, much of the music that followed throughout the nineties actually owed more stylistically to Pearl Jam’s combination of grunge “authenticity” (usually demonstrated through dreary, navel-gazing lyrics) with classic rock structures and textures provided the basis for a lot of the shitty rock of the post-grunge era (Creed would be the obvious offenders here, but there’s a thousand other groups that I just can’t be bothered to name). It might be unfair to slag Pearl Jam for the sins of their execrable progeny, but for better of for worse the band’s second album is very much an augury of shit to come.

Still, it’s not a bad record. “Go” is an excellent beginning (especially given that it was written by the drummer). “Daughter” and the pretentiously-titled “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town” would be destined to be coffeehouse features for sensitive bros with acoustic guitars and bead necklaces, but that shouldn’t be held against them, I suppose. In parts, the white-boy pseudo-funk gets a little much (and there’s rather a lot of wah-wah on this record), but while nothing Pearl Jam could ever do could ever hit the heights of, say, “Lithium”, “Sliver”, or “Aneurysm”, there are no real weak tracks here. And in the obnoxious douche-bro department, hey, at least they’re not Sublime.