12.

Pearl Jam

Dark Matter

Talk about a surprise. While there have occasionally been things I’ve enjoyed about post-90s Pearl Jam, by and large I’ve found their records over the last 25 years to be very poor. I still play their 90s albums all the time, of course (excepting No Code – although even that record I’ve somewhat reappraised recently), and when I finally got to see them live in 2008 it was so much fun. But as a going concern, I largely wrote Pearl Jam off almost two decades ago. It was a shock, then, when Dark Matter turned out to be excellent. The surprise is admittedly more in the quality of the songwriting than the nature of it. Dark Matter is certainly ‘a Pearl Jam record’ – mixing trademark catchy grunge powerchords (see ‘Running’) with anthemic rock ballads (see ‘Wreckage’). That said, there are a few welcome curveballs too, such as the proggy closer ‘Setting Sun’, which reminds me of some of the weirder stuff on Vitalogy. The common critique in reviews that Vedder’s voice isn’t what it once was is accurate to a point, but it’s still a pretty great voice (and remains very distinctive). And the songs are just so good one hardly notices anyway. While Dark Matter still falls a distance short of their 90s work, it’s comfortably my favourite Pearl Jam album since Yield in 1998. Which means – remarkably for a band that I have liked so much and for so long – that this is Pearl Jam’s first ever appearance on The List (on what is its twenty-fifth iteration). Because the last time they released an album I liked enough to be a potential entry was before I had even started writing an annual list. Contender for greatest comeback album in rock history - ?