Jerk Music Critic: Pearl Jam, Ten

No alternative band likes to be a prototypical anything because everyone's a special snowflake, but this album set the aesthetic a billion acts consciously aped for a decade to follow and arguably none of Pearl Jam's own follow-ons transcended it either. Despite the fact contemporary listeners might find it comparatively sedate or maybe even slow, and the production isn't always dynamically adventurous, the album delivers with weighty themes, McCready/Gossard's skillful guitar riffs and the bassy, groaning vocals of Eddie Vedder. The grind is good when it's hopping ("Even Flow," "Deep"), and there's a surprising amount of philosophical thought ("Alive") mixed with genuinely tender, raw emotion (from the conflicted eroticism of "Black" to the aspirational nostalgy in "Release"), at least when it doesn't devolve into amorphous angst ("Once," to its detriment). In fact, that accessible level of emotion is the strongest part of the album, translating unobstructed by artifice even when the band's stylistic reach gets past their grasp (the harmonic ambiguities of "Oceans" get an A for effort but an incomplete for melody). It's why a single like "Jeremy" succeeded: despite, or perhaps because of, the childlike lyrics and the disturbing subject matter, you could feel the buried anger fume in every string and syllable, and for five minutes we were all that tortured kid together. Indeed, exactly that sort of effortless auditory transference is why this album still succeeds today. The 2009 reissue adds a few Mookie Blaylock demos from the interregnum between Mother Love Bone and this incarnation; they are inferior to the worthy B-sides and session outtakes that are also included (especially "Brother," which really should have been included to start with). Although the iTunes re-release's live bonus tracks make for a solid show, the physical reissue is really the one most fans will enjoy more, though the replica cassette and LP inclusions might be a little much. (Content: F-bombs, adult themes, violence.)

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Express Yourself

The Jerk Music Critic is a collection of amateur music reviews I wrote largely non-professionally between the 1990s and today. Some of these reviews are contemporary and some are retrospective, and a few are rather dated, but all are intended to be free-standing and permanent records of my completely worthless musical opinion. They are presented in no particular order and "new" reviews that occur may actually be simply prior ones I've only now transcribed. Older reviews have been edited to hopefully remove inaccuracies later revealed, as well as add brief content advisories (see "Smash the PMRC") and, where reissues exist with different tracks, brief commentaries on these later additions (the actual star review was not altered).

If you're looking for a specific artist, or just interested to see what I really liked (or really didn't), "When I Break Down" indexes reviews by artist and by number of stars awarded (see "Star Chart" for an explanation).

As we move deeper into the Internet music age where the album format might seem hopelessly antiquated, there is still some artistic value in the LP to those artists who still take advantage of it, and some of these recordings can only be properly appreciated in that context. I hope you enjoy these reviews and recommendations, and don't take them too seriously. — Cameron Kaiser

Star Chart

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An instant classic. Substantially advances/d the state of the art, either technologically, stylistically, or (preferentially) both, and is outstanding music besides. Buy it.

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A excellent album. Nearly every song is a gem; nearly every piece is a winner. Falls short of 5 stars for want of that certain special something, but the difference is in impact, not in musical quality. Buy it.

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Solid. Mostly good songs with a few clinkers. Salvageable with a good playlist. Buy it cheap.

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Mixed. Some good songs stand out, but not enough to make it listenable as a whole. Buy the good songs on iTunes.

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Bad. One or two tracks of even decent quality. Buy the good songs cheap on iTunes.

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How did this get released?

Smash the PMRC

I don't advocate for censorship or unnuanced black and white stickers, but I do advocate for parents being able to raise kids in the way they see fit, which might include introducing albums of controversial yet artistic merit at a point in their child's life when they can better appreciate it. The content summaries are intended to be a very general guide, reflective of only my own personal sensibilities and mine alone, and do not substitute in any way for a parent actually sitting down and listening to the album themselves. If you excessively rely on my content advisories, then I'm the one raising your kid, and you really don't want that.