Ten was more or less my first favorite album, the first CD that I listened to front to back over and over and got really obsessed with the band, beyond anything I'd experienced with the Hendrix or G'n'R or Aerosmith albums I'd been listening to up until that point when I was 10 years old. And over the years, Pearl Jam has remained one of my favorite bands, if a lot less central to my taste, and ultimately I ended up liking the 4 albums that followed more than Ten itself. "Porch" is still one of my favorite songs, but the rest of it I can usually take or leave. For most of my adult life I've been pretty cautious about burning myself out on albums, and even now I'm almost superstitiously averse to listening to an album more than a couple times in the space of a week. But I may have killed that album for myself, or maybe radio did it, or maybe it really just hasn't aged well at all. So it's been interesting to try to listen to last month's reissue of Ten with fresh ears.

Poor Rick Parashar; the guy produced one of the biggest rock albums of the '90s, but the band found a more suitable long term producer with the follow-up and eventually had the guy remix even that one album Parashar did. And really, like I said, the four Brendan O'Brien albums really stand up to me as the defining Pearl Jam sound and all generally better albums than Ten, so I can't say I'm a huge fan of the guy (although his spacious, reverb-heavy sound works much better on the Temple Of The Dog album). But in a weird way, the O'Brien remixes on the Ten reissue don't quite feel like improvements in the way I expected; it feels more like an interesting academic exercise in the important of mixing than anything else. Now and then it'll reveal something that was harder to hear before, like the organ on "Black" or some of the awesome guitar leads buried in "Porch"'s climax, but in a way the minor differences in an album that's been tattooed on my brain in one form have a kind of uncanny valley effect. "Garden" in particular loses a lot of its aura when the guitars are pushed way to the front. It's the same reason the alternate takes on the reissue of Marquee Moon make me grit my teeth with annoyance, they're just so subtly different that it drives me insane.

I was really surprised, though, that when I later listened to disc 1 of the reissue, a merely remastered version of the album with the original Parashar production intact, I could just kind of turn my brain off and really enjoy it, sing along and rock out to some of those songs like I haven't in probably over a decade. But I'm still enjoying the chance to kind of deconstruct the sound and structure of the album. For shits and giggles, I threw together an alternate Ten tracklist on iTunes: It starts with "Deep," includes some goofy b-sides like "Dirty Frank" and the entire Mamasan trilogy, ends with "Yellow Ledbetter" and excises most of the album's big hits. And it's not at all intended as an ideal or improved version of the album; really it's just an exercise in seeing how different I can make the album just using the actual recordings from that era, and in a way I think I came up with a scenario in which the album wouldn't have been successful. And I'm sure those guys wonder all the time what life would be like if things had turned out like that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:57 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.