Pearl Jam review: band opens new tour with epic Vancouver concert

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Pearl Jam and Vancouver have a history, as Eddie Vedder reminded his faithful last night.

It was the first date of the Seattle band’s current North American tour and the vocalist got serious, praising the city, remembering his first concert here at the Town Pump (in ’91, opening for Alice in Chains), mentioning how They had decided we were the right choice for the opening night of their new world tour, referencing the Canucks and even today’s Vancouver Marathon.

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Between the kind words, Vedder and crew played the hits, deep cuts, new material and some covers in a concert at Rogers Arena that lasted more than two and a half hours.

He was longer than Napoleon.

To start, the band moved the night forward with some mid-tempo sure bets, including the sepia-toned Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town. The slow burn paid off with the fourth song, Given to Fly, a jet-powered rocker that ushered in the world premieres of four new tracks: barnstormers Scared of Fear, React, Respond and the new album’s title track, and the most melancholic and delicate Wreckage. . The latter, with its signature PJ guitar riff, sounds destined to join the ranks of fan favorites.

The band returned the show to dry land with Daughter, one of the group’s most revered long-running songs. Correctly calculating that the audience would lose their collective st if he did something like, oh, I don’t know, put a few lines in the song of one of the country’s most beloved musical institutions, Vedder added a verse from the Tragically Hip’s. Bobcaygeon. Some 15,000 Canadians roared their approval of him.

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The reference reminded me of the late, great Gord Downie, who connected with the audience in the same intentional and committed way that Vedder does.

Anyway, back to the show. If you wanted deep cuts, you got them, with Leatherman, played live for “the first time since 2016,” according to songlist.fmand the deepest cut of all: Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns by Mother Love Bone, the proto-Seattle band co-founded by future Pearl Jammers Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament.

About an hour into the process, Vedder began to pick up the wine. I have to say, it’s refreshing to see someone enjoying a drink on stage in today’s ultra-cautious, careerist live music environment. Or maybe I’ve just been attending the wrong shows.

The nerves of the first night were evident: the band ruined one song (Red Mosquito, from 1996’s No Code), and this just after the singer pointed out the soundman to the crowd, saying he had been with the band for 20 years and your only job is to adjust two buttons, the “Suck” and “Don’t Suck” buttons. He talks about cursing yourself.

Otherwise, the players were in the pocket, as would be expected from an act of this level. And Vedder’s voice sounded phenomenal; He seems to have lost none of the emotional power, value or reach of it. But were they on fire?

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Let’s just say their second show in Vancouver on Monday night could leave this one in the dust.

So as not to curse him…

Another set of Dark Matter material included Upper Hand, with a chorus stickier than even the floor of Rogers Arena; Won’t Tell, a resonant slab of ’90s guitar-rock; and Running, the thinnest and baddest on the album. The lyrics to Won’t Tell, Vedder informed us, are based on a dream bassist Jeff Ament had that involved “a Canadian woman.” Make of that what you will.

Ament, by the way, was wearing an Idles tour t-shirt, perhaps purchased at the British group’s much-praised show the night before at the PNE Forum.

Throughout the concert, a wall-to-wall V-shaped screen behind the band supplemented the performance with graphics, including close-ups of the musician and the audience and cosmological images, as befits the album’s title (“dark matter” is a scientific term to refer to matter). which does not interact with light or the electromagnetic field).

After a long, impromptu Porch, the first selection of the night from the group’s 13 million-selling 1991 debut, Ten, the 60-something gang took a well-deserved break. Vedder returned for a solo version of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down before Ament, lead guitarist Mike McCready, rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard, drummer Matt Cameron, and touring musicians Josh Klinghoffer and Kenneth “Boom” Gaspar returned. .

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After Black, another Ten cut, Vedder dedicated Dark Matter’s sweetest song, Something Special, to one of his daughters, who he said was at the show.

No one, neither the band nor the audience, wanted to leave when the house lights came up and Pearl Jam, one of the last standard bearers of the Generation X dream, performed Alive, a signature anthem that had never sounded more relevant, and Neil Rockin’ in the Free World by Young (idem). Setting Sun, Dark Matter’s final and perhaps most hopeful run, left us in the night.

Side note: Opening the current month-long West Coast leg of the Dark Matter World Tour is Seattle’s Deep Sea Diver. Before Saturday night’s set, vocalist/guitarist Jessica Dobson delivered stinging, choppy licks as she guided the quintet through songs from Impossible Weight, KEXP Seattle’s listener-favorite album from 2000, and an upcoming record.

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