Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 11/11/2002
Label: Epic

Some musicians are born weary, some achieve weariness, and some have weariness thrust upon them. And then there's Eddie Vedder - he of the quavering baritone, unimpeachable good intentions, and confused poeticism in an unpoetic world - a man who would appear to fit the bill three times over. And while "weary" isn't generally a rock'n'roll selling point, Pearl Jam's seventh studio release achieves something of a rare, Neil Young-scale feat, in making sense of weariness, while stubbornly forging for vitality, when, in a rock context, everything will have been said a good half-dozen albums ago.

To the matter at hand, then. More musically straightforward than 2000's 'Binaural', 'Riot Act' is possessed of a few dark gems of songs-as-songs (the hushed and holy 'Thumbing My Way', cousin to the hard-won simplicity of Nick Cave's 'The Boatman's Call', being the standout) and more than a few fleeting moments of beauty ('Cropduster', 'I Am Mine'). 'Riot Act' may be neither 'the-best-album-since' nor 'a-brilliant-return-to-form', but neither is it 'more-of-the-same-but-less-so'. Which, in a weary-making world of endless arenas and the beady-eyed Creed-style imitators, pulling the least delicate of Pearl Jam's attributes out and serving them up oversimplified, is surely success in itself.

It probably helps, here as always, that the band have what they surely must see as the morally stainless tradition of hard muso graft to fall back on. And, guitar solos as a bad idea or not, the road-tested telepathy of Messrs Gossard, Cameron, Ament and McCready is frequently the salvation of 'Riot Act', even when Vedder's words amble tantalisingly just beyond the range of comprehensibility or, in the brief but pretty vocalese of 'Arc', abandon English altogether.

Taken as a whole, 'Riot Act' suggests there's some relief in weariness, after all. 'Love Boat Captain', with its scarred echoes of the Roskilde disaster ("lost nine friends we'll never know, two years ago today") settles on a stubborn, heart-rending insistence on the word "love, love, love" as though weary repetition is its only hope. 'Bushleaguer' benefits from its almost perversely underplayed languor; considering it's a spoken-word indictment of George W. Bush, its exhausted more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger approach may well be what saves it from the pomposity that would trap a lesser band on a similar soap-box.

And for a weary album, a beautifully weary conclusion: the sleepy, bar-closing amble of 'All Or None', all brushed drums and delicate keyboards. As a lullaby, it scarcely ensures quiet dreams - "It's a hopeless situation and I'm starting to believe/That this hopeless situation is what I'm trying to achieve" - but as four-odd minutes of beauty forged from the lumpen weight of rock and the even more lumpen weight of its creators' history, it gleams. Darkly.

    by Jennifer Nine