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“In the process, Adam went and re-miked everything very covertly. “On ‘Thumbing My Way,’ we were out in the room learning the song,” Ament recalled to Billboard. Band members have noted that he fostered a less structured environment, where fresh approaches could be recorded before they became over-practiced. Gaspar has continued to record and tour with the group in the years since.Īdam Kaspar, who had engineered previous Pearl Jam tracks, was another addition as co-producer. Gaspar had become a surfing buddy of Vedder’s, and when the frontman introduced him to his bandmates, they took to the idea of bringing pronounced keyboards into their sound. Kenneth “Boom” Gaspar joined in the recordings on keyboards, cutting soulful swaths of Hammond organ with which to lace Pearl Jam’s melodic hooks. It wasn’t a breakthrough, but a refinement. But Riot Act’s mix of rock muscle and sonic investigation found a balance that had somewhat eluded the group’s studio records since 1994’s Vitalogy.
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A diversity of sounds – blistering rockers, hushed acoustic tracks and curious experiments – was all but guaranteed. As with previous releases Binaural and Yield, all of the guys contributed their own sketches, which were turned into full-blown tracks via studio collaboration. Vedder, like the other four members of Pearl Jam, also brought his own musical ideas - including riffs, melodies and chord outlines - to the sessions. “He’d run upstairs while we were in the studio and type out his lyrics and then come back down and cut them that night. “I’ve never seen Ed work harder on lyrics,” McCready told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In fact, the band’s frontman became even more integrated into the recording process by setting up a typewriter in a studio alcove, allowing him to soak in the sounds coming from guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron. On “Love Boat Captain,” Vedder addresses the Roskilde tragedy directly: “ Lost nine friends we’ll never know, two years ago today.” But he also praises the ability to heal, singing “ One you hold the hand of love, it’s all surmountable” and quoting the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love.” Elsewhere, he finds dark humor in an excoriation of then-President Bush on “Bu$hleaguer” (“ born on third, thinks he got a triple”), takes aim at greedy CEOs on “Green Disease” and gets philosophical about it all on “Cropduster.”Īlthough previous Pearl Jam recording sessions had witnessed bouts of writer’s block for primary lyricist Vedder, nothing like that surfaced while the band were making Riot Act at Seattle’s Studio X and Space Studio in 2002. Again, these are subtle shifts in sound, but they are notable and, given several plays, this does indeed seem like the richest record Pearl Jam has made in a long time.“I’m optimistic yet disillusioned,” singer Eddie Vedder told the A.V. Also, the production is the best in nearly a decade - a warm, burnished sound filled with details that enhance the basic song instead of overwhelming them (in other words, it's not No Code, nor is it the Spartan Yield). He enlivened 2000's Binaural, but his forceful drumming gives the weirder songs and ambitions support and urgency. Given the appealing but haphazard nature of their late-'90s work, it's quite satisfying to have a Pearl Jam album play as strongly as Riot Act, and again some credit must be given to drummer Matt Cameron. If it doesn't announce itself as a comeback or a great step forward, it's because the changes are subtle - it's a process of their post- Vitalogy sound finally gelling, not making an artistic breakthrough. Here, they manage to seamlessly blend the two impulses together in a restless, passionate record that delivers musically and emotionally. Vitalogy found the band sketching out their ideas for their brand of artsy rock, separating bracing hard rock and experimentalism throughout that fascinating album, and since then they bounced between those two extremes: indulging themselves on No Code, over-compensating with the streamlined Yield. In some ways, Riot Act is the album that Pearl Jam has been wanting to make since Vitalogy - a muscular art rock record, one that still hits hard but that is filled with ragged edges and odd detours.