The Smile – Cutouts – Album Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

The Smile – Wall of Eyes – Album Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Album Review: Ride - Smile

Smile is a compliation of Ride's first two EPs, Ride and Play, released in 1990.  For those used to Ride's albums this feels a lot more ramshackle and very sixties, particularly opener Chelsea Girl which is kind of like a crunchier Byrds.  This surging, rush of a track is followed by the swaggering riffing of Drive Blind, All I Can See and Close My Eyes, which have an almost psychedelic grungy guitar sound.  Some of Mark Gardener's vocals are endearingly ropey, but all of these are very fine tracks nonetheless.

It's very early nineties, Like A Daydream is a perfect example of that shoegazey/baggy sound that begat Britpop.  The one track that doesn't work as well as the rest is the plodding Silver, but it's obliterated by the thrilling guitar on Furthest Sense and Perfect Time where, unbeknownst to them, they were mining a similar heavy seam of psychedelia as the Screaming Trees.

As good as any of Ride's later material, this deserves investigation.

Album Review: Pearl Jam – No Code

After Vitalogy and their battle with Ticketmaster there was a sense of exhaustion about Pearl Jam. Something had to give and it did. There was a palpable sense of pulling back about 1996’s No Code. Aside from the beautiful packaging, it starts out with the very understated Sometimes, a slow, creeping number in which Eddie Vedder croons about being “like a book amongst the many on the shelf”. It’s hard not to see this as a metaphor for where Pearl Jam wanted to go, to fade away from the limelight.

The influence of Neil Young was all over this album, particularly on the loping Crazy Horse like Smile and Red Mosquito. Lead single Who You Are was a real departure for Pearl Jam, a kind of uptempo campfire strum. There are more standard issue rockers like Hail, Hail, which rocks along at 90 miles an hour, and also Habit and the 60 second Lukin. These tracks pack as much wallop as anything in the Pearl Jam catalogue.

But it’s the stripped-down tracks which work really well here. Off He Goes is a really affecting song, sensitively sung by Eddie Vedder which has real impact. Equally successful is Present Tense, a real brooding number which explodes into life briefly midway through before settling back into contemplation mode.

Mankind has Stone Gossard on lead vocals, and he suffers in comparison to Vedder, which renders the song as something of a failure. They embrace their weirder side with I’m Open, a dark spoken word song before finishing with the really stripped-down Around the Bend, displaying a side of Pearl Jam which hadn’t previously been heard.

As Pearl Jam albums go, this one is quite experimental (for them), though in some ways it endures as much as their better known works such as Ten, vs etc.