Tangled Up In Eddie's Blues

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By Newsweek Editors

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The pop-culture landscape is so damn cheerful these days. Here we have Courtney Love, wife of that guy from Nirvana who blew his head off: in her current video she's sitting on a bed screaming that you will ache like she aches. And here we have those cute punks from Green Day, singing about paranoia as their eyes bug out under fluorescent mops. Pearl Jam has only just released their third album, but along with Nirvana they're godfathers of the movement. They gave angst a good name. It almost makes you long for those golden-saccharine days when bands like Bon Jovi just sang about getting chicks.

Pearl Jam's new album, ""Vitalogy'' (Epic), is so unbearably grim, yet so simultaneously exhilarating, that it's hard to know whether to call it a masterpiece or slam the CD case shut and walk away. Like Neil Young's blueprint of catharsis ""Tonight's the Night,'' ""Vitalogy'' is a portrait of a guy (singer Eddie Vedder) caught in a netherworld of emotions. The album's title, and its eerie artwork stolen from a New Agey health treatise from 1927, suggest an analysis of inner life. But there's death splattered all over it -- from the notations of Vedder's own despair to the lingering specter of Kurt Cobain to the album's horrifying coda, in which an unidentified voice blithely admits to thoughts of suicide. For Vedder, every image, no matter how sweet, has a catch. ""Don't need a hand,'' he snarls in ""Whipping.'' ""There's always arms attached.'' ""Spin the Black Circle,'' a furious little punk number, alludes to heroin. And if you still suffer the delusion of thinking Vedder is some kind of sex symbol, he provides this thumbnail sketch in ""Satan's Bed'': ""I sh-- and I stink / I'm real, join the club.''

The irony is the band has never sounded better. Gone are the lapses into heavy-metal cliche and punk posturing: every lick of guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready feels fresh, focused and well placed. The two ballads, ""Nothingman'' and ""Better Man,'' have an unornamented perfection; ""Not for You'' and ""Corduroy,'' Vedder's most plainspoken railings against fame yet, rock so hard you hardly care what they're about. Throughout the album, songs fade in and out, leaving you to think there's more going on than you will ever know or hear. Pearl Jam deserves credit for articulating a bleak state of mind with such painstaking precision. ""Vitalogy'' will probably stand not only as their strongest album, but as yet another dark landmark for a generation. Just take Vedder's angst for what it is: music, not a matter of life or death.

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