"Pearl Jam - Rearviewmirror: Best of 1991-2003"

Pearl Jam holds a strange place in my musical collection--a band I started listening to in my formative early teen years (ah, the angst of junior high school), abandoned in my later teenage years, and picked up again as a young adult. Pearl Jam is also one of the first bands I started listening to because a friend recommended them--Chris Sehorn, a guy I went to elementary and junior high with. His parents were fairly "cool" as far as my preteen brain could understand the idea--they let up stay up late, play videogames until ridiculous hours, eat and drink whatever they wanted, and call them by their first names. They also had what I thought was an awesome record collection. I mean, they were in their thirties, and they listened to Pearl Jam and Pink Floyd. It was bizzare. I mean, sure, my own father listened to Pink Floyd, but he was an old fart compared to these people.

So yeah, I got into Pearl Jam because a friend liked them, and I held on through the band's third album, Vitalogy, which came out in 1994. I was only 14 at the time, and my musical tastes (while growing) were still pretty basic. That was the year I entered high school, rejected all things newer than about 1975, and retreated to my Beatles records. I was eventually drug back into the present by various friends (most notably Wendy in high school and James in college, though telling James that he's had any influence on me is something I couldn't bear to let him know because he'd never let me hear the end of it), and even started listening to Pearl Jam again. I gave their Riot Act a try, and found it wasn't too bad. Then a couple months ago, I picked up Lost Dogs, and it reminded me why I'd liked this band in the first place.

Well, Rearviewmirror cements the deal. Two discs of career-spanning goodness. Like Lost Dogs, Rearviewmirror is divided up between "rockers" and "ballads," though this is Pearl Jam, so the ballads aren't always mellow "oh, woe is me, my love has left me" drivel. Each disc is arranged chronologically (except for "Yellow Ledbetter," oddly enough, which appears at the end of the ballads disc. Which I find strange, since it was slotted at the end of the rockers disc on Lost Dogs. But that's a minor detail), and each disc kicks serious amounts of ass.

Now, given that I tuned these guys out after their third album, I missed out on about three albums' worth of material, so I only knew about half the songs on this set. That was okay, though, because the songs I didn't know were still uniformly excellent. The nice thing about Pearl Jam is that, even though the band constantly attempts to expand its sonic pallet, musical style, and artistic vision, there is still a consistency to their body of work that holds up well.

The set skews more towards the band's early work, and over half the songs on here are from the Vitalogy era or earlier. But since that's when the band was at its peak, this weighting doesn't seem amiss. The song selection is hard to argue with. All the big tunes are here, from "Jeremy" to "Even Flow" to "Last Kiss," "Wishlist," "I am Mine," and "Hail Hail" and everything in between. "Last Kiss" and "Yellow Ledbetter" are repeated here from Lost Dogs, but they're such good tunes (and had such a limited release when they first came out) that you don't really mind. Besides, they fit well alongside the rest of the material.

One interesting thing to note is that several of the songs from Pearl Jam's debut, Ten, have been remixed for this album. I'm usually against remixing and redoing songs for Hits collections, as the remixes are not the original songs (y'know, the songs that actually were the hits). But in this case, the remixing works to the songs' benefit, restoring some of the rough edges to the music and stripping away some of the glossy sheen that the music had in the original mixes.

My one complaint with the album, really, is the packaging. First, it's in one of those paper slipcases. I really don't care for those; I prefer the plastic jewel cases. They're sturdier, hold up better, and don't seem as cheap or slapdash. The other problem is the complete lack of liner notes. Lost Dogs had excellent notes on each song, comments from various members of the band about the recording of the tunes, the meaning behind them, etc. No such thing for Rearviewmirror, though. Admittedly, this doesn't detract from the excellent music here, but the collector/music enthusiast in me is a bit annoyed by the lack of delux packaging.

All in all, Rearviewmirror is an exceptional summation of the band's work to date, a solid reminder of why Pearl Jam was one of the frontrunners in the grunge revolution of the early '90s. Though their heydays are long passed, the band still cranks out excellent music that is worth listening to, and this collection gives you a wonderful sampler of the best each of their records has to offer.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Pearl Jam, "Nothingman"