Pearl Jam

E.V. phone home. It’s nothing as it seems, the little that he needs, it’s home, Eddie Vedder sings on “Nothing as it Seems” (it’s a Jeff Ament song). Vedder sounds bruised and distant here and throughout Binaural, the new Pearl Jam disc with a celestial theme in its artwork. He’s an alien falling to Earth, landing on a bed of Who-like guitars and wan, impressionistic lyrics. But as extraterrestrial contact goes, this is a pretty ho-hum affair.

By now, the structure of a Pearl Jam album is easily calculable. Binaural kicks off with a short, urgent rocker (the snappy “Breakerfall,” which points out one of PJ’s other habits, that of crunching words together to effect short or punny song titles). This is followed with a slightly less-short stuttering rant (“Gods’ Dice”) meant to emphasize the punky chops and high-dudgeon brevity of a band on the go. By the fourth song, Vedder remembers to insert a little philosophy; “Light Years” is the first memorable tune on the record but is hobbled with an amateurish chorus: We were but stones/Your light made us stars.

The humble treacle of Vedder’s lyrics here and elsewhere suggests that he’s rushing his midlife crisis or listening too much to Neil Young’s recent moon/June/spoon affair, the insipid Silver and Gold. Luckily, the guitar axis of Stone Gossard and Mike McCready grows more resourceful each album, even as they backdate their sound two decades to an era when bands broke up only when their planes crashed.

Like other PJ discs, Binaural falls apart in its second half. Having run out its slow-jam jones before the album is half over, the band struggles to make its remaining ideas sound relevant. “Grievance” could easily have fit on any but the first Pearl Jam album, Ten, which remains the group’s watershed moment.

But like 1998’s Yield, the band has buried a great song late, “Soon Forget.” It’s as inscrutable as the rest of Binaural but, like the band’s best songs, transcends drama for something haunting. The same can almost be said for the hidden track (another PJ staple), a ruminative romance with strings that doesn’t quite sustain its seven-minute running time.

With Binaural, Pearl Jam continues to be rock’s most frustrating also-ran, a group that works much too hard at mattering but keeps the struggle listenable. It’s a spaced-out record that makes you want to believe; it just doesn’t make you want to play it very often.