Published on Nov 11, 2005
No Code is Pearl Jam’s answer to a concept album. A drastic
departure from the grunge/stadium rock sound of its predecessors,
No Code is a mishmash of the weirdest ideas thrown out by
the band on their worst acid trips.
No Code is undoubtedly Pearl Jam’s most insane effort;
however, it is a great record.
Pearl Jam’s music always had an air of pretentiousness, with its
macho yet sophisticated belligerence and a bloated ego.
No Code finds the band in a new light and in a completely
different frame of mind.
To begin with, singer Eddie Vedder sounds like an intelligent
folk singer-songwriter this time around. He is more down-to-earth
and introspective than he ever was. On “In My Tree” — a track that
reeks of Greenpeace activism — he is at his earthiest, as he sings
“Wave to all my friends, yeah / they don’t seem to notice me, no /
all their eyes trained on the street,” about the simple pleasures
of living in a tree. Vedder has never dared to be so
naïve.
Moving away from the band’s traditional bombastic songwriting
nature, the songs on this record are blatantly confessional and are
more honest than on any of Pearl Jam’s earlier albums. On “Present
Tense,” Vedder is most poignant, as he advises against committing
suicide in Bob Dylan-ish poetic style and in the manner of an
enlightened preacher, whose only motive in life is to make other
people’s lives better.
Vedder’s vulnerability on “I’m Open” is almost scary, as he
speaks in a brooding and meditative fashion on the false comfort of
living in a dream world, and the difficult and almost inevitable
transition to the harshness of reality.
By the time
No Code was out, Pearl Jam had made some interesting
collaborations with other artists/bands, and the influences coming
out of these collaborations make obvious presence on the album’s
music. It is impossible not to link the infectiously rhythmic
hands-clapping (reminiscent of Qawwali music) on “Who You Are,” to
Vedder’s famous duets with the late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh
Ali Khan on the soundtrack of
Dead Man Walking.
Also, a glimpse of Pearl Jam’s full-time transition to folk rock
on later albums is seen on “Hail-Hail,” “Smile,” and “Off He Goes,”
and it is but obvious that Vedder and co. took a few lessons from
Neil Young while collaborating on Young’s
Mirrorball.
No Code is Pearl Jam like you’ve never heard before. This is
the only album on the group’s entire catalog that neither sounds
grunge nor folk rock. This experimental adventurism by the band may
be a letdown for a lot of Pearl Jam fans; however, this album was
critical in cementing Pearl Jam’s reputation as not merely grunge
rockers, but also a bunch of versatile musicians/song-writers.