Pearl Jam in starcrossed times, Lead Album,

The world is burning and the President’s brain is missing. Pearl Jam’s eleventh LP proves their time has come again. By Keith Cameron. Illustration by Darkhouse Quarter.

Pearl Jam ★★★★ Gigaton MONKEYWRENCH/REPUBLIC. CD/DL/LP

AS ABOVE, so below. In our age of disruption, astrology has become a prominent voice amid the daily chatter. ‘Mercury in retrograde’ is an internet meme phenomenon, discussed rather than dismissed on such pillars of rationality as the BBC. And while you probably always reckoned Eddie Vedder was a spiritual kinda fellow, a song on his band’s new record makes it poetically plain. “Stars align, they say, when things are better than right now,” Vedder sings. “Feel the retrograde spin us round.”

The six and a half years since Lightning Bolt is the longest gap between records in Pearl Jam’s 30-year history. March 10, 2018 saw the release of Can’t Deny Me, billed as the first taste of their next album. This cowbell-clanging blast of Gang Of Four-style agit-punk, with a sleeve image of placardwielding street protestors, positioned its authors as a resistance vanguard: “You plant your lying seeds,” seethed Vedder, one of rock’s great mob orators. “The country you are now poisoning/ Condition critical”. A European tour T-shirt featured Joe Rosenthal’s famous WW2 photograph ‘Raising The Flag On Iwo Jima’ altered to depict Old Glory flying upside down – sacrilege to all true red, white and blue-nosed American patriots.

Although certainly not the first time during three decades of political and community activism that Pearl Jam had mocked a Republican President, Can’t Deny Me represented a new level of polemic in their art. Yet no new album came in 2018, nor the year after – and now it finally has, both message and mode are more nuanced than that preliminary strike suggested. The picture is bigger, the perspective global. A ‘gigaton’ is a scientific unit used to measure the loss of ice from the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, equal to a billion tons. The album sleeve’s font design resembles an electrocardiograph. Earth is on life support: condition critical.

Conspicuously absent from Gigaton is Can’t Deny Me itself. Whereas that was recorded with longtime studio ally Brendan O’Brien, this album is self-produced by the band and engineer Josh Evans. It’s only their second without O’Brien either as producer or mixer, and his absence from the control room has apparently coincided with an unbuttoning of the mindset, with Dance Of The Clairvoyants the most audacious example. Pearl Jam have previously tended to equate experimental with obtuse, but this is a sublime, nervous-compulsive electro-dream, built from Matt Cameron’s steely impersonation of a drum machine, with lubricious Stone Gossard bass, a haunted Jeff Ament synthesizer pattern, and Mike McCready’s minimalist riff all ultimately enveloping Vedder’s meditation on time: Earth’s scarcest commodity. “When the past is the present and the future’s no more,” he sings, a disconsolate crooner fronting Tom Tom Club. “Numbers keep falling off the calendar’s floor…”

As an album trailer, Clairvoyants predictably riled conservative segments of the band’s fanbase. Yet even when ostensibly closer to the PJ heartland, the program is subversive. There’s a raw aggression to driving opener Who Ever Said’s geometric riffs not witnessed since Life Wasted on 2006’s Pearl Jam or, before that, the bulk of 1998’s Yield. Its ghostly E-bow and sequencer prelude is curtailed by Ament’s bass belching like Seattle’s neighbourhood volcano Mount Rainier waking up, then everyone piles on. Vedder’s growling about the bogus noise of the modern world: “Sideways talk, poisoning our thoughts.” The momentum mimics the singer’s mental joust between engagement or disconnection – essentially, the dynamic of Pearl Jam’s entire career. Next up, Superblood Wolfmoon is a wildly torqued garage rocker, Gossard and McCready chopping and shredding like an Oval Office cleaner, Vedder keeping sharp amid the levity: “Don’t allow for hopelessness, focus on your focus-ness.” Shaking up the band’s hallmark union of classic rock heroics and punk astringency yields new ways to kick out the Jam. Never Destination summons soul-punk power like a latter-day Saints for its jab at climate change deniers. While Ament and McCready attack Quick Escape’s trippy Led Zep bludgeon with relish, Vedder takes its “Kashmir to Marrakesh” travelogue as cue to pick up the cudgel: “The lengths we had to go to then/To find a place Trump hadn’t fucked up yet”. Eventually the protagonists land on “the red planet”, in a “Kerouac sense of time”, like dazed and confused cosmic refugees. Mercury is here too, albeit this time, with “Queen cranking on the blaster”, he’s assuredly on the up.

Even PJ’s latest nailed-on nomination for humanist world anthem scrambles the template: Seven O’Clock (tick, tock) opens with impressionistic guitar flares and mid-tempo uplift, before off-roading into a surreal White House docudrama soundtrack, Neil Young’s Campaigner orchestrated by Duke-era Genesis. Over rueful keyboard flurries, Vedder invokes Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, contrasting these true American heroes with “Sitting Bullshit as our sitting president” who we see looking in the mirror: “His best days gone, hard to admit/Throwing angry punches with nothing to hit.” It closes with oceans, strings, and Ed’s hackles all rising: “Hangman in dreamland, about to call your name.”

The three Pearl Jam albums following the opaque millennial diptych of Binaural (2000) and Riot Act (2002) broadly presented a welcoming face to the world, and all the better for it. By Lightning Bolt, however, the formula was squeaking, and perhaps that explains why this one took a while. At 57 minutes, Gigaton is the longest Pearl Jam album – 2009’s Backspacer was an almost neurotically tidy 36 – and you feel O’Brien might have put his foot down here and there, possibly on Vedder’s solo acoustic Comes And Goes, notwithstanding its class Pete Townshend homage. Overall, though, every song earns its place. The sequencing delivers a contemplative final third, which Take The Long Way’s MBV-go-metal synthesis could have usefully shaken up. But the pay-off is the stunning Retrograde, a McCready composition that opens out like a stadium-scaled take on Richard & Linda Thompson’s Dimming Of The Day – apt, given its apocalyptic undertow: “Seven seas are raising/Forever futures fading out.”

No mega rock band can endure for 30 years and sustain peak connection to the culture. Yet with Gigaton, strong and loose, political and personal, Pearl Jam get the balance absolutely right – a powerful example of collective rigour trumping ego. As Vedder notes on Dance Of The Clairvoyants, “There’s not one man who’s greater than the sum.” Positive thoughts for star-crossed times.

“Vedder’s growling about the bogus noise of the world.”