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TEN, Pearl Jam's debut album, was released less than a month before Nirvana's NEVERMIND, and although it took longer to climb the pop charts it also hung around longer, eventually outselling its Seattle rival. Together, the two albums reinvigorated ... Full Descriptionrock and roll, whose share of the pop marketplace had been slipping through the late 1980s. But while Nirvana's bruising punk rock was an all-out assault on the classic-rock dinosaur, Pearl Jam's accomplished hard rock was an attack from within the system.
The drawn-out, bluesy guitar riffing and anthemic choruses that dominated TEN instantly gave away roots in the same popular hard rock and heavy metal that Nirvana was intent on crushing. Indeed, before forming Pearl Jam, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament (who between them wrote most of the music on TEN) were the core of two '70s-influenced metal bands, Green River and Mother Love Bone. But in place of the self-aggrandizing, larger-than-life singers that led most such bands, Gossard and Ament found Eddie Vedder, a ravage-voiced vocalist more apt to identify with the abused and misunderstood children he was singing about than with any other rock stars. When he exploded into one of TEN's many memorable choruses, Vedder offered transcendence for the people who needed it most.
The storyline of the album's breakthrough single, "Jeremy," was typically vague and elusive (despite a highly suggestive video), but the message was not. The meek and the misunderstood, Pearl Jam seemed to be saying, would rise and inherit the world, even if it was only a world of their own invention.
Live Recording
Recorded at London Bridge Studios, Seattle, Washington from March to April, 1991.
Engineers: Dave Hills, Don Gilmore, Adrian Moore.
Pearl Jam: Eddie Vedder (vocals); Mike McCreedy, Stone Gossard (guitar); Jeff Ament (bass); Dave Krusen (drums).
Additional personnel: Walter Gray (cello); Rick Parashar (piano, organ, percussion).
Spin (9/99, p.136) - Ranked #32 in Spin Magazine's "90 Greatest Albums of the '90s."
Spin (1/93) - Ranked #15 in Spin's list of the 20 Best Albums Of 1991.
Q (12/99, p.74) - Included in Q Magazine's "90 Best Albums Of The 1990s."
Q (1/93, p.73) - Included in Q's list of the 50 Best Albums Of 1992.
Q (3/92, p.79) - 4 Stars - Excellent - "...a raucous modern rock, spiked with infectious guitar motifs and powered with driving bass and drums...may well be the face of the 90's metal..."
Village Voice (3/2/93, p.5) - Ranked #34 in the Village Voice's list of the 40 Best Albums Of 1992.
Stereo Review (1/92, p.80) - Performance "Challenging" / Recording "Good" - "...the band sounds larger than life, producing a towering inferno of roaring guitars, monumental bass and drums, and from-the-gut vocals...the tunes here surge, ebb, and surge again..."
Kerrang (Magazine) (p.51) - "[T]hese songs are as touching today as the day they came out..."
Q (Magazine) (p.123) - "The hit singles 'Jeremy' and 'Alive' wove serious lyrical subject matter to flurrying guitar solos and singer Eddie Vedder's hectoring vocals..." Hide DescriptionPurchase Ten CD To buy, Click on price to add to cart | Pearl Jam vs. CD (1993)
Ten album
 $9.25   
VS. was nominated for a 1995 Grammy Award for Best Rock Album. "Daughter" was nominated for Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals, and "Go" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance.
Although it topped the pop charts and sold 5 million copies, Pearl Jam's stunning second album is unknown to much of the rock audience. Recoiling from the octopus-like grasp of the music industry, the group refused to support VS. with either videos, singles or a major tour, and rock radio was given just two acoustic-powered ballads, "Daughter" and "Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town," as so-called emphasis tracks.
The former was about a sexually abused young girl promising to rise above her past, the latter about a forgotten woman with nothing but long gone memories. The rest of the album rocked significantly harder--harder and more raw, in fact, than anything on TEN--and zoomed in on a cusp between those two stories, on moments when outlaws, outcasts, the dispossessed and the disaffected were being called to political judgment. The woman sheltering a "Dissident" gives in and turns him over to the police. But the abused subjects of "Go" and "Rearviewmirror"--two of the album's most musically heroic songs--manage to turn the tables and get away.
There was a suffocating bleakness ...
| | Pearl Jam Vitalogy CD (1994)
Ten CD music
$9.25 
Recorded in Seattle, Washington; Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana.
The CD version of VITALOGY includes a 32-page book; the cassette version includes a 16-page book.
"Spin The Black Circle" won a 1996 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. VITALOGY was nominated for 1996 Grammys for Album Of The Year and Best Rock Album.
Wider in scope than any 70mm film, VITALOGY is the album on which Pearl Jam demands that the pigeonholing cease and desist once and for all. Whether by throwing meatless bones at some blindly zealous fans, or by moving their sound out of the grunge-land that they once called home, Vedder & Co. present this 55-minute tour de force as a treatise to win over the alternative non-believers and drop the excess baggage of fame.
There's nothing fancy to VITALOGY: no ACHTUNG BABY or OUT OF TIME-like transformations, no post-modern gimmickry, no Steve Albini sound. Nevertheless, VITALOGY is revolutionary by Pearl Jam standards because it presents a collection of actually crafted songs, and succeeds in spotlighting the band's growing diversity.
The proof is all over the place: "Corduroy" is an honest-to-goodness pop song, ...
| | Pearl Jam Yield CD (1998)
Ten music CDs
$9.25
"Do The Evolution" was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance and Best Short Form Music Video. YIELD was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package.
Nay-sayers and trends be damned. Pearl Jam's follow-up to 1996's NO CODE continues down the path of aggressive rock and roll, existential musings and musical experimentation. This isn't your older brother's grunge. Opening with the hard-driving "Brain Of J," YIELD goes from a punky swagger representing man's arrogance in asserting his lofty place on the food chain ("Do The Evolution") to a free jazz approach and a disembodied Vedder vocal questioning the meaning of life ("Push Me, Pull Me").
Most of YIELD continues to ply the standard Pearl Jam sound: Vedder's pained emoting, the interesting ...
| | Pearl Jam No Code CD (1996)
Ten songs
$11.39 
Understated, often folksy 1996 album returned the Seattle grunge pioneers to prominence.
Pearl Jam's ambitious and mystical NO CODE is no more a grunge album than Nirvana's MTV UNPLUGGED was a punk album, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who's been listening all along. Even while helping to codify the droning heavy-metal blare of grunge, Pearl Jam has fought that code, breaking the rules of the music as defiantly as the band's business practices defy the rules of the music industry. By now, Pearl Jam can, and does, employ Indian drones, psychedelic rock, punk and folk without reaching.
NO CODE, the band's fourth album, opens with "Sometimes," a prayer that slowly rises toward an anthemic chorus. But the song pulls back before it gets there, as if the band's goal is to embody the smallness of all of us. Pearl Jam still, clearly, believes in the awesome power of rock: In "Habit," Eddie Vedder nearly goes hoarse ranting at a friend who's picked up a dangerous one, and in "Red Mosquito," the band works up from a folk-rocky waltz into a '60s acid-rock whirl. But much ...
| | Nirvana Nevermind CD (1991)
Ten album
$10.25 
NEVERMIND raised groundbreaking Seattle grunge trio Nirvana to the status of Godhead, forever changing the face of the pop music market. Punk energy and aesthetic ("Territorial Pissings," "Drain You") are its lifeblood; pop melody, harmony, and structure ("Something In The Way," "Come As You Are") its selling points; Kurt Cobain's roaring guitars and subconscious intellect ("Smells Like Teen Spirit," "In Bloom") its heart and soul. Nobody had come up with an album like NEVERMIND before, because no one could conceive of an album like it--not since Husker Du had broken up, anyway.
But the place where NEVERMIND struck the most firmly and personally was in the gut. Cobain's throaty roar, ...
| | Cynic Traced In Air CD (2008) Limited Edition; Digipak
Ten CD music
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| | Various Artists States And Capitals CD (1993)
Ten music CDs
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| | Kevin Kendle Clouds CD (2000) (Import) United Kingdom
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| | Various Artists Goin' South CD (2000)
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| | Milva Canta Brecht CD (2003) (Import)
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| | Le Tigre CD (1999) Bonus Tracks
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| | Various Artists 90'S CDs (2005) (Import)
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| | Strokes First Impressions Of Earth CD (2006) Deluxe Edition
Ten album
$12.15
With 2006's FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EARTH, the Strokes have not only crafted an album that cracks the 36-minute mark, they've also opted for a bolder sound, courtesy of veteran producer David Kahne. While these changes don't mean a drastically different direction for the New York City-based rock band, they do indicate that frontman Julian Casablancas and the boys are in a more adventurous mode.
EARTH's initial single, the driving, hard-edged "Juicebox," features Casablancas giving a raspy vocal performance that sounds more impassioned than anything on the group's previous outings, while "On the Other Side" is an almost ...
| | Con-Artist Productions presents Microphone Militia: Boot Camp CD (2005)
Ten CD music
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| | Forget Cassettes Salt CD (2006)
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| | Viajero Norteno Para Todos CD (2006)
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