The first single, “Dance of the Clairvoyants” is a good example. “Gigaton” sounds as democratically unfettered as anything we’ve heard from Pearl Jam since “No Code” cast the band’s fair-weather fans into the wilderness of Creed. But for the most part, no one footprint feels like it’s too large. You can feel their individual compositional contributions on every track. How to keep Coronavirus stress at bay: Listen, really listen, to your favorite albums, front to back, without distraction.Ī more innocent variety of social distancing with the band members leading separate lives may have contributed to how fresh this album feels. Music The lost art of deep listening: Choose an album. When I returned home some 57 minutes later - possibly to never leave again - all I could say to my wife was, “It’s like they knew.”
Then Spotify, ever the optimist, teased me with the news that an old musical friend, Pearl Jam, had a new record out. Ambulatory existential reckonings had become an increasingly tall order, and my wide-ranging library was struggling to rise to the occasion even as the loss of a few friends and the infection of others had me thinking about old friends and what they’ve meant to me.
Maybe these would be the days the music died too?īut on a walk around my neighborhood not long ago - that is, not long ago according to the calendar - I started my afternoon ritual of bearing mute witness to the gathering gloom by scrolling through my phone, looking for musical companionship. Now the pandemic has rendered much of pop culture, save for a few classic westerns and the miraculous Larry David, as anachronistic as a Grand Princess cruise line commercial. After all, it has been gestating for seven years, taking shape via a sort of long-distance, idea-sharing dynamic necessitated by the band members being adults with lives and children who they had been ferrying to school and soccer and the stuff of everyday life as we knew it. Of course Pearl Jam didn’t intend for its new album, “Gigaton,” to be a coronavirus hymnal.
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