Pearl Jam, Ten (Legacy Edition)

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.