Jobie Reviews Music 171: Ten (album) by Pearl Jam. Requested by ActuallyApollo.

Ten is a 1991 grunge album by the band Pearl Jam. It is 11 tracks long, encompassing 53 minutes and 21 seconds of music. The album features a humongous amount of excellent instrumentation and vocals, with plenty of riffs and bridges to go around in its nearly hour long run time.

The aforementioned vocals and instrumentation are absolutely spot-on on this album, making each of the album's 11 tracks highly enjoyable to listen to. Lengthy guitar solos and bridges can be found on a decent percentage of the album’s tracks, which are always well executed when they appear on the album. Plus, these solos and bridges don’t feel like filler in the slightest, instead adding to the tracks’ overall enjoyability and display of pure musicianship.

Eddie Vedder’s vocal range is the cherry on top of the (mostly) well written lyrics, bringing the album’s lyrical content to the forefront when the band needs them to. The autobiographical track “Alive” is perhaps one of the better examples of this, with Vedder’s vocals making the personal nature of the track all the more apparent.

Of course, we can’t talk about Ten without also talking about “Jeremy”, one of the more popular songs out of the 11 tracks on the album. With “Jeremy”, the band deliver some rather well-executed material that pertains to a real life incident that received relatively minor press coverage in January 1991, 7 months before the album was released and 2 months before recording sessions for the album began.

The band’s handling of the subject matter is extremely tasteful and respectful, all the while retaining the great instrumentation and vocals that I’ve mentioned several times throughout the course of this review. All in all, “Jeremy” manages to be a highly enjoyable, grim track based around true events that further proves that the band’s musicianship can be used to adapt real life incidents into grunge tracks that give said real life incidents more notability in the long run.

My favorite tracks from this album include “Even Flow”, “Alive”, “Black” and “Jeremy”.

Overall, Ten is a fantastic album from the grunge band. From autobiographical tracks like “Alive”, to the real life inspired “Jeremy”, this album’s contents offer up a wide variety of lyrical content, with Vedder’s vocals bringing said lyrical content to the forefront and making each song a highly effective grunge melody. With lengthy bridges and solos contained throughout the album, the album offers up a huge amount of replay value, its enjoyable sound making it an absolute joy to listen to.

Overall rating:

9.5/10

LINK TO ALBUM:

https://open.spotify.com/album/5B4PYA7wNN4WdEXdIJu58a