Ten [Vinyl Collection]

Performer: Pearl Jam
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: Pearl Jam: Eddie Vedder (vocals); Mike McCreedy, Stone Gossard (guitar); Jeff Ament (bass); Dave Krusen (drums). Additional personnel: Walter Gray (cello); Rick Parashar (piano, organ, percussion). Engineers: Dave Hills, Don Gilmore, Adrian Moore. Recorded at London Bridge Studios, Seattle, Washington from March to April, 1991. Audio Remixer: Brendan O'Brien. TEN, Pearl Jam's debut album, was released less than a month before Nirvana's NEVERMIND, and although it took longer to climb the pop charts it also hung around longer, eventually outselling its Seattle rival. Together, the two albums reinvigorated rock & roll, whose share of the pop marketplace had been slipping through the late 1980s. But while Nirvana's bruising punk rock was an all-out assault on the classic-rock dinosaur, Pearl Jam's accomplished hard rock was an attack from within the system. The drawn-out, bluesy guitar riffing and anthemic choruses that dominated TEN instantly gave away roots in the same popular hard rock and heavy metal that Nirvana was intent on crushing. Indeed, before forming Pearl Jam, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament (who between them wrote most of the music on TEN) were the core of two '70s-influenced metal bands, Green River and Mother Love Bone. But in place of the self-aggrandizing, larger-than-life singers that led most such bands, Gossard and Ament found Eddie Vedder, an explosive vocalist with a ravaged timbre more apt to identify with the abused and misunderstood children he was singing about (and to) than with any other rock stars. After producer Brendan O'Brien remastered a few TEN tracks for the later greatest-hits collection, REARVIEWMIRROR, the band pressed him for years to remaster the entire album. In 2009, the band re-released TEN with O'Brien's remaster, a rendering that strips away the early '90s reverb and lays bare the scabrous edges in both the twin guitars and Vedder's voice. Including many extra tracks and paraphernalia, the many different versions of the reissue placed the official stamp of "classic" on a record that always had the air of one. For the twentieth anniversary of their debut Ten -- an event that arrives in 2011 and is being celebrated in 2009, but who's counting? -- Pearl Jam went all out and delivered not one but three reissues, all in increasing levels of lavishness. First off is a standard two-CD set, followed by a triple-disc set that adds a DVD of the band's 1992 performance for MTV Unplugged and then there's a gargantuan, frankly ludicrous, collectors edition that has all that plus four slabs of vinyl containing the two mixes of the album plus a 1992 live show, one cassette that replicates the original demo Eddie Vedder turned in as his audition, and assorted memorabilia that retails for $200.00. All this commotion camouflages the really noteworthy aspect of this anniversary edition: Pearl Jam brought in their longtime producer Brendan O'Brien to remix Ten from the ground up, to strip away the studio affectations of producer Rick Parashar and mixer Tim Palmer that made it a bright, shiny anomaly during the dingy heyday of grunge and make the album sound more liked the rest of the band's work (which O'Brien produced, after all). This isn't full-scale cultural revisionism on the order of George Lucas -- the original album is preserved in remastered form on the first disc -- nor is it akin to the massive reworking of Raw Power that took liberties with the aesthetics of a classic, altering some crucial reasons why it was influential, but rather like a director's cut that's designed to be closer to the artist's original intentions. Since Ten is the odd man out among Pearl Jam's albums -- its shimmering surfaces and gated rhythms too eager to crossover -- this revision also seems logical, bringing it closer to the sound and feel of Vs. and Vitalogy without drastically altering its character. Actually, it's quite arguable that this lean, muscular remix is a marked improvement on the original mix, as it's easier to focus on both the songs and group's interplay. The only room for complaint is that for a deluxe reissue this seems to skimp on the bonus tracks, never bothering to include all the relevant non-LP songs from Ten. It's seems that the logic behind their absence is that they're all available on the compilation Lost Dogs and the bonus material here is all unreleased: a version of "Brother" with vocals (an instrumental was on Lost Dogs), early versions of "Breath and a Scream" and "State of Love and Trust" recorded a year before the Singles soundtrack, and the unreleased "Just a Girl," "2000 Mile Blues," and "Evil Little Goat." Although the latter two sound like the unfinished outtakes they are, it's still nice to have all this material in circulation, but even so it doesn't feel quite right to have a reissue of Ten that misses the B-side "Yellow Ledbetter," a song that received a lot of radio play during the peak of the album's popularity. It also doesn't feel right to have that original demo available only as a cassette in the super-deluxe version of Ten -- or to have the live show only on vinyl, for that matter -- when it would have been easy to expand the set out to three CDs and have this material available for everyone, but in a sense, that's nitpicking: the mad collectors are going to invest in the $200.00 set while the less dedicated will be happy with the remix which is certainly reason enough to justify this entire multi-format project. [A vinyl-only version was also released.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Rolling Stone (p.66) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "'Alive' hits harder; 'Black' feels broader in scope; and Eddie Vedder's soaring vocals on 'Oceans' shine brighter." Spin (9/99, p.136) - Ranked #32 in Spin Magazine's "90 Greatest Albums of the '90s." Spin (1/93) - Ranked #15 in Spin's list of the 20 Best Albums Of 1991. Q (12/99, p.74) - Included in Q Magazine's "90 Best Albums Of The 1990s." Q (1/93, p.73) - Included in Q's list of the 50 Best Albums Of 1992. Q (3/92, p.79) - 4 Stars - Excellent - "...a raucous modern rock, spiked with infectious guitar motifs and powered with driving bass and drums...may well be the face of the 90's metal..." Village Voice (3/2/93, p.5) - Ranked #34 in the Village Voice's list of the 40 Best Albums Of 1992. Stereo Review (1/92, p.80) - Performance "Challenging" / Recording "Good" - "...the band sounds larger than life, producing a towering inferno of roaring guitars, monumental bass and drums, and from-the-gut vocals...the tunes here surge, ebb, and surge again..." Kerrang (Magazine) (p.51) - "[T]hese songs are as touching today as the day they came out..." Kerrang (Magazine) (p.52) - "With its nod to classic '70s rock in the shotgun guitars and engaging Vedder's ragged, back-to-the-wall fury dissecting a fractured family life anthem like 'Alive' and 'Jeremy' sound as relevant and impassioned today as they did on the original release." Q (Magazine) (p.123) - "The hit singles 'Jeremy' and 'Alive' wove serious lyrical subject matter to flurrying guitar solos and singer Eddie Vedder's hectoring vocals..." Q (Magazine) (p.114) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[With] classic songwriting that wasn't afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve....The freewheeling guitars of 'Even Flow' and 'Jeremy' sounded vintage even then, so it's no surprise that they've held up so well after all these years." Mojo (Publisher) (p.116) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "TEN is a classic of the grunge era, its super-sized anthems and introspective mood pieces powerfully voiced by Eddie Vedder..." Blender (Magazine) (p.64) - 5 stars out of 5 -- "It's an exhilarating punk howl....It's a batch of outsider's tales coursing with beefy swagger..."

Pearl Jam strode the middle of the neo-hard rock road manfully with their angst-ridden anthemic tunes bearing echoes of 1970s riff-rock. They arrived as part of Seattle's grunge explosion, with a sound less "punk" than Nirvana and less "metal" than Soundgarden. Radio, MTV, and fans responded accordingly, making them one of the biggest bands of the 1990s. Eddie Vedder's intense, impassioned style marks him as one of the most affecting vocalists in modern rock, and the group's battles against corporate giants like Ticketmaster have shown them to be a true "people's band."

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