Back Spacer

Pearl Jam is one of those bands I was into heavily back in the day but then they finally fell off my radar. This even though the last Pearl Jam album I bought, Yield, I considered to be one of their best. They are inextricably linked to another time--the early nineties, at the heart of the Grunge movement. They exploded on the scene, and their songs "Alive" and "Jeremy" from their first album are as emblematic to their time period as "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is to the early sixties.

They have a new album out now, and since it got some decent reviews I picked it up. It's called Back Spacer, and the title, which refers to a typewriter key, is indicative of what that key does, because the record is something of a throwback to old fashioned rock and roll. The songs are short, the album is short (just over thirty minutes) and most of it is straight-forward bar band muscle.

The album kicks off with three such songs: "Gonna See My Friend," which would seem to be about drug addiction, "Got Some," and "The Fixer." The latter two are my favorites on the record, with infectious hooks and crashing drums by Matt Cameron. "Johnny Guitar," "Amongst the Waves" and "Supersonic" are also in this vein, though less successful.

Not so great is "Just Breathe," which seems to be a song for thirteen-year-old girls, an acoustic number (complete with squeaking guitar) that has chick-flick bromides. Even worse is "Speed of Sound," which seems to be playing at the wrong speed.

Eddie Vedder wrote all of the lyrics on the album, and they only really stand out on a couple of tracks. "Unthought Known" has some enjoyable inscrutable lines like, "Feel the sky blanket you with gems and rhinestones, see the path cut by the moon for you to walk on." The record ends with, appropriately enough, a devastating song called "The End," which is either from the point of view of a man about to die or, perhaps, already dead: "Help me see myself /cause I can no longer tell/looking out from the inside of the bottom of a well/It's hell/I yell/but no one hears."

Back Spacer is effective rock and roll. It doesn't pack the wallop of earlier Pearl Jam releases, but it gets the job done.