Endless Equations

Pearl Jam “Dance of the Clairvoyants”

Over the past two decades Pearl Jam shifted fully over to a jam band model in which the live show – and recordings of the live shows – was the primary focus of everything they did, and new studio albums were sporadically made as a way of bringing new songs into the setlist and having a peg for launching big tours. They only released four albums in this time, which is quite a drop from their frantic pace of writing and recording through the ‘90s. The records have their moments but feel very formulaic, as though the band identified a set of song archetypes they had to iterate on in order to fill out a sequencing arc that was pretty much the same every time. (2002’s overlong Riot Act is an outlier in this respect, but the tracks on the subsequent albums are interchangeable in production style and musical function.)

So with this in mind, “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” the first single from the forthcoming record Gigaton, is quite a surprise. “Dance” doesn’t sound quite like anything the band has ever done – it has prominent synths, a groove that encourages awkward dancing, and a vocal by Eddie Vedder that verges on a full-on David Byrne impression. It’s dark, but also sort of cheeky. (Near the end Vedder sings “I know the boys wanna grow their dicks and fix and file things.”) Even if the description of this seems potentially horrible, it all clicks together very nicely and sounds genuinely inspired. The band seem motivated to push themselves musically and Vedder is clearly inspired by the bleakness of contemporary politics and the oncoming disasters of climate change. His rich baritone is well suited to doomsaying, and when he sings a line like “the past is the present and the future’s no more” it comes out sounding like a prophecy rather than paranoia.

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