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Ten (Legacy Edition)

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Pearl Jam

 
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Ten (Legacy Edition)
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Avg: 4.5 (686 ratings)

  • Date Released: March 24, 2009
  • Genre: Alternative/Punk
  • Label: Epic/Legacy
  • Copyright: (P) 1991 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./(P) 2008 Sony Music Entertainment

Pearl Jam's finest addition to the classic-rock canon

  • We Say...

    Review by Cory DuBrowa

    Here's something that makes me totally and irrationally angry — and living in Portland, OR, so near to grunge's Ground Zero, I do continue to hear it said, more than 18 years after the album's release: "Ten sure has a lot to answer for: Matchbox Twenty, Everclear, Candlebox, Creed, hell, that whole brand of manly 'testosterone/action rock' can be directly traced to that album."

    Well, sure, but does that automatically make Nirvana responsible for ripoff artists like Silverchair and Bush? Should we blame Led Zeppelin for the waves of crappy guitar-based bands that slavishly aped all their loudest, most macho moves, but completely missed the nuance, the light and shade, that made them great? It's a moronic argument: Ten stands proudly beside such epic works as Who's Next, Everyone Knows This is Nowhere, Are You Experienced? and Let It Bleed as one of the finest guitar albums ever, while serving as a sonic starter's pistol for a band who've evolved, grown and turned into one of our most cherished artistic touchstones during the two decades they've remained a going musical concern. If others chose to imitate the elements that made it the classic it was, what could Pearl Jam do about that?

    What you can still hear most clearly on Ten is the sound of personal pain filtering its way through a then-unheard mixture of Black Flag and Black Sabbath, with a classic-rock sheen applied on the back end and a sly, Prince-like groove curling its way through the album's hook-laden riff-a-rama. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had just lost their Mother Love Bone compatriot Andy Wood to a heroin overdose, singer Eddie Vedder was clearly channeling some demons of his own (Ten's lyrics touched upon such seldom-heard topics as abortion, suicide, psychiatric hospitals, childhood family traumas and the sort of doomy introspection more often associated with Ian Curtis or Robert Smith), drummer Dave Krusen drank his way through the sessions (eventually he would leave the band and check into rehab), and the group's songs spelled out in no uncertain terms the cathartic release all of them seemed to require at that moment.

    The subsequent public response to Ten was slow at first, but fans eventually lapped it up by the millions; the band toured relentlessly behind the record while turning in some legendarily incendiary live shows in the process; the singles "Alive," "Even Flow" and "Jeremy" turned them into radio and MTV megastars — launched the so-called grunge movement as a mainstream cultural phenomenon and made Pearl Jam superstars in the process, a turn of events they struggled to come to terms with (and spent much of the subsequent decade attempting to live down). But there's no denying, even now, that Ten's finest tracks ("Even Flow," the sublime "Black," the closing anthem "Release") are as resonant and unique today as they were back in 1991, before they'd launched a million imitators hoping to combine the band's ear for melody with its equally weighty gift for authentic interpersonal connection.

    The recent re-release of Ten adds some interesting b-side curios ("State of Love and Trust," "Just a Girl," "Brother," "Breath and a Scream," "2,000 Mile Blues" and "Evil Little Goat") but doesn't necessarily make it any better than it already was — no matter the cloak it wears or the adornments fitted onto it, Ten remains its generation's finest addition to the classic-rock canon.

  • They Say...

    Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

    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 "Legacy Edition" was also released.].

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