Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam

150-gram double LP

The eighth studio album by the American alternative rock band. Pearl Jam returned in May 2006 with their first studio album in four years. The band socks away the adventurous experimentation that dogged some of its most recent records to investigate a post-September 11, war-ravaged world overflowing with urgency and significance.

"It's the same everyday in a hell manmade/What can be saved, and who will be left to hold her?" lead singer Eddie Vedder wonders in "World Wide Suicide," one of several contemptuous rants on the Bush administration. Yet the album's spark is more than political. Songs such as "Life Wasted," "Comatose" and "Big Wave" embrace the garage-rock past, as guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard play off each other with the primal lucidity of a decade ago and drummer Matt Cameron, one of rock's best, adds raw backing vocals to Vedder's polished craft.

But Pearl Jam also turns up some of its most harmonious works since "Daughter," including "Marker in the Sand," with its radio-ready chorus, the tuneful "Parachutes" paced by Gossard's divine strumming, and the burning narrative and Urge Overkill punch of "Umemployable." Finally Vedder pleads for a lover's return in "Come Back," a keyboard-soaked love song complete with a chilling Gossard solo. It's got a soulfulness that begs for Sam Cooke to sing it and an originality that shows that a vibrant and cocksure Pearl Jam is back in town — and ready to retake the world.

1. Life Wasted

2. World Wide Suicide

3. Comatose

4. Severed Hand

5. Marker In The Sand

6. Parachutes

7. Unemployable

8. Big Wave

9. Gone

10. Wasted Reprise

11. Army Reserve

12. Come Back

13. Inside Job

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