“Late 20th Anniversary Celebration/Is Pearl Jam’s Album Binaural on a Complete Plane of its Own?”

And what do I mean by being on a “plane of its own?” Oh, Christ, I dunno. You just had to ask that, didn’t you? I guess it amounts to offering a singular experience no other Pearl Jam, and maybe even no other alternative rock album (the closest possible exception probably being LIVE’s Secret Samadhi) can muster.

Well, even on paper, it is the only LP by these guys to utilize the “Binaural [1] recording techniques, which employ two microphones to create a 3-D stereophonic sound, (which) were used on several tracks, such as the acoustic ‘Of the Girl.’” Indeed, one listen to this track, one of the best on the album and of Pearl Jam’s career, will give you an idea of the otherworldly level of warmth to which this technique is capable of sending a recording.

The binaural recording mechanism was the innovation of Tchad Blake, the new producer the band summoned for Binaural (2000). For the prior four LP’s, Vs., Vitalogy, No Code and Yield, they’d enlisted Brendan O’Brien as sound man, and he’d also been instrumental in galvinizing their live sound and also getting them thinking outside the box with their songwriting and selection, spearheading “interludes” like “Pry, to” and “Aye Davanita.” His handiwork would prove pretty essential, at that, as they indeed called him in to finish the job on Binaural, allotting him “mixing” duties.

This, if anything, as well as them being consecutive albums, would go to bolster my conception of Binaural as “Yield’s sister album.” Actually, both LP’s open with a brisk, punk-rock type number, both move on to poppier, catchier material within, both contain somber and reflective hit singles and both possess 13 tracks total. In fact, it’s probably not unlikely that the band were wary of making an album in Binaural that was too similar to their prior effort, and for that reason enlisted a new producer.

Another key shift that Binaural represents in Pearl Jam’s catalogue is the move to drummer Matt Cameron, from the former Jack Irons. Pearl Jam enlisted Matt Cameron from Soundgarden, hence making his credentials pretty impeccable, of course. Right away, if you listen closely enough, you can notice the difference between “Breakerfall,” which opens Binaural, and Yield’s lead track “Brain of J.”: the former features a drum beat that lives on the toms, instead of the conventional high hat rhythm you’ll find Irons playing on “Brain of J.” Everything, in the world of drums, is turned on its head: the rhythm is syncopated, or containing gaps, instead of consisting of steady quarter notes, hence furthering the sense of freshness this music possesses.

Cameron would really make his stamp on Binaural, then, with “Evacuation,” a song actually completely composed by him. Actually, per a pretty funny episode in the biography Pearl Jam Twenty, the band was apparently completely adrift at learning it, struggling infinitely with Cameron’s unorthodox seven-bar phrasing in the verses. Cameron’s defense, or explanation, rather, of the malady, was simply: “It’s a drummer tune!”

And this is kind of an aside but how about that album cover? That has got to be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t really know what exactly it is being depicted and I don’t suppose that it necessarily matters: it’s some sort of iridescent representation of some set of objects being portrayed with liberty regarding their exact shapes and colors. But it righteously sums up, I think, the flairs of the binaural recording scheme: each individual microphone does not necessarily pick up ONLY sounds the other one doesn’t. Certain sounds will register in both — like a Venn Diagram. In this way, you could say, the concept mimics the human hearing mechanism with two ears — sounds you hear around you might hit one ear first, not necessily meaning the stimuli will never grace the other one.

One feather in the cap of Binaural is that it’s grounded and well-defined in the sense that “Of the Girl,” the proudest fruition of the production quirk, is also, almost undeniably, the emotional centerpiece of the album. Now, one funny thing, or awesome thing, really, about Pearl Jam, is their voluminous band member plurality in the department of songwriting. Binaural, at that, is no slouch in exhibiting just this, in fact perhaps the most ebullient example of such plurality and hence theoretically vying for best Pearl Jam album, which indeed I think it at least does. “Evacuation” was the Matt Cameron “drummer tune,” “Light Years” is a paean by Vedder to a lost Chicago friend and “Nothing as it Seems” is a Jeff Ament dirge about going back home to Montana and finding the landscape drug-addled and calamitous. In good reflection of this personnel makeup, Vedder’s voice seems a little more expressive on “Light Years” than on other songs, with Mike McCready’s “sonic pyrotechnics” [3] described as “the Hughes and Kettner rotosphere” [4] on Pearl Jam’s community discussion thread page.

On “Of the Girl,” the musical personality is comprised of this full-band effort of acoustic but warm, trippy and vibrating guitar sounds. The sounds are so distinct and plentiful that the result can be certainly hypnotic, disorienting if you’re in the business of trying to figure out what the he** is going on from an equipment standpoint, as I am.

That translucent, gentle and pliable, but full and boisterous, bass sound, is a fine example of one of the binaural strategy’s key strengths, more than likely, playing into two separate mikes with distinction and vibrant autonomy, for a surreal low-register mix component. Indeed, most songs which featured those weird “sonic pyrotechnics” on the part of Mike McCready would have showcased them prominently, with such abrasive stabs here relegated to the background, hence retaining the song’s warming, entrancing disposition. The lyrics are Stone Gossard’s and so when Vedder delivers them there’s naturally not the same gravity as is owned by, say, “Light Years,” which is nearer and dearer to the singer’s heart. But look, it doesn’t even matter: the lyrics are so dark and haunting as to wield a synergy of their own, and Vedder’s delivery bespeaks enough intrinsic appreciation for his bandmate’s artistic offering as to infuse the project with more than enough energy. The ominous social landscape conveyed by the lines “He fills his nights / With the thought of a girl” is soundtracked perfectly by the gentle, undulating score of the song, mimicking cognition, in its own way, and calling to mind the Dionysian, ethereal realm of night and dreaming.

By the end of “Of the Girl,” Binaural has been a pretty full eight-course meal, and to be honest, the rest of the album plays like it’s already been a full meal, with the exception of “Rival,” a ridiculously fun three-four stomp about mentally conceiving a gun homicide. I mention earlier that Binaural vies for best Pearl Jam album in my book: I’m probably going to still go with Vs., ultimately, for the glorious back-woods-stomp of “W.M.A.” and the amazing way “Daughter” has of never getting old (Ten strikes me as overproduced and I hate the first song on it). I think Binaural ties for second with Yield and sure you might say albums can’t “tie” for second-best by a band but remember this is Yield’s sister album we’re talking about here. Yield “yielded” Binaural. And this is Pearl Jam coming into their own as a popular alternative-rock imprint and a songwriting collective, with a newfound focus and mastery of production that render these late-’90s/early-’00s LP’s magnanimous, holistically enjoyable listens. Later, the band would take an unfortunate turn for the political, in the wake of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, but Yield and Binaural stand as time capsules to this day of when Pearl Jam was on top of the world but still had everything to prove, and proved it.