It’s been over 20 years since Pearl Jam released their monumental debut Ten and followed it up with the almost equally impressive Vs. and Vitalogy. Now in their late 40s, the alt-rock legends have understandably slowed down, mellowed out, and grown up. Where Ten was a surprisingly personal anthem for the young and confused, Lightning Bolt is those same people looking back on life with a bit more experience and understanding.
Over the past few years, a lot of Pearl Jam’s catalogue has become stale, and at times this album suffers from the same problem other bands who have been around for a few decades face. Like any recent Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Lightning Bolt has songs that are so typical of the band’s sound that anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Pearl Jam could guess what the entire song sounds like ten seconds in. ‘Lightning Bolt’ and ‘Swallowed Whole’ are the most obvious examples: they are standard rock songs that are entirely forgettable and could have appeared on practically any Pearl Jam album.
When the band moves away from its well-established brand of post-grunge rock, things do get a bit more interesting. The first single, ‘Mind Your Manners’ is a solid punk-influenced song that is reminiscent of their 1994 single ‘Spin the Black Circle’ while ‘Pendulum’ is a dark haunting soundscape mixed with sparse vocals that wouldn’t be out of place in the bonfire scene of a western. It’s hard to fault Pearl Jam’s musicianship, even when they stray towards rehashed pop-rock songs, and lead guitarist Mike McCready especially leaves his mark on the album whenever he reaches back to his roots and actually plays a solo, as he does on ‘Sirens’ and ‘Let the Record Play.’
Where the album really shines, though, is with Eddie Vedder’s lyrics and vocals. Of course, this has been the case with every single Pearl Jam album from the beginning. Over two decades after the debut that established Vedder as the most poetic lyricist of the grunge movement, he is still as personal as he was back then. ‘My Father’s Son’ finds him struggling with his identity as the son of a man he barely knew, crying in anger, “Now father you’re dead and gone and I’m finally free to be me.” Meanwhile, ‘Mind Your Manners’, ‘Sirens’, and ‘Lightning Bolt’ deal with the nature of life, religious doubt, and hypocrisy. Lightning Bolt often sounds like Vedder’s personal diary, but it’s an existential kind of diary that asks questions and doesn’t leave you feeling dirty for invading someone’s privacy.
Vedder’s vocals are, similarly, often the highlight of any given song. ‘Sirens’ itself is a fairly typical mellow rock song and wouldn’t make the cut on the album if it weren’t for the soulful baritone vocals that only get better when Vedder goes into his falsetto. It’s not as powerful as classics like ‘Black’ but it’s clear his voice is as strong as ever. ‘Future Days,’ the final song on the album, is a simple acoustic love song that works because of the vocals. Eddie Vedder could write a song about punching koalas in the face and still make it sound heartfelt and personal.
Very few people would claim Pearl Jam have ever been able to recreate the intensity and experimentation of their first three albums, and although it doesn’t quite get there, Lightning Bolt is by no means a disappointment. There are no songs on the album that are terrible; some of them are, admittedly, forgettable and add nothing to Pearl Jam’s reputation, but there is enough new interesting material here for any fan of Pearl Jam, old or new. It’s not Ten, but 22 years on, of course it won’t be.