Pros: some of the remixes improve greatly, Brother and Just a Girl
Cons: revisionist history on DVD, incomplete Unplugged, some remixes fall flat
The Bottom Line: This Deluxe Edition is a nice little treat for hardcore fans, but casual fans can feel free to keep spinning their 18 year old copy of Ten.
MattA75's Full Review: Ten (Deluxe Edition) by Pearl Jam
When one mentions rock albums of the 1990s, usually two answers come immediately to mind. The first is Nirvana's Nevermind, an overrated disc that isn't even that band's best of the decade. The second is the debut album from another Seattle band, Pearl Jam. Ten has over the years proven to be just as, if not more, influential than Nevermind. Granted, what it's given us in watered down third rate acts like Theory of a Deadman hasn't always been the best, but what can you do.
Despite shipping 13 million copies and counting, it has never been much of a secret that the band themselves has never been thrilled with the way Ten sounded. Full of reverb and, at times, poor and muddied production, many fans have been clamoring for a remixed version of Ten for years. When Brendan O'Brien remixed 3 songs from it for the release of the band's greatest hits album Rearviewmirror in 2004, some wondered why he couldn't have just done the rest of the album as well at that time.
Fast forward 4 and a half years later, and an announcement came that Pearl Jam would be re-releasing Ten in various packages. The legacy edition would contain the original album and a second disc featuring a fully remixed Ten by Brendan O'Brien, as well as six bonus tracks from the band's early demos and Ten sessions that had never been officially released. The deluxe edition would contain a DVD of the band's legendary MTV Unplugged performance. And the super deluxe edition would contain all of this, plus a 2 LP set of the band's Drop in the Park concert from Seattle in 1992, the 2 versions of Ten on vinyl, a recreation of the original demo tape Eddie Vedder sent the rest of the band, and a 140 page book featuring all sorts of photographs and memories from the era.
At $140 (or more, depending on where you went), the super deluxe was a bit high even for my admitted superfandom. So I decided to go with the deluxe edition, mostly for the the Unplugged DVD. But I was most excited about an O'Brien remixed Ten. I always thought Ten had great songs and sounded like crap in a lot of spots. If anyone could fix that, it was O'Brien.
Surprisingly, some of that reverb and muddied production had actually helped some songs. Even more surprising was that O'Brien had actually gone back and done new mixes on Once, Alive and Black, the three songs he had done once already for Rearviewmirror.
So what's the deal? Well, some songs are helped, and some songs actually suffer a little bit. The biggest improvement is by far felt on Porch, which feels infinitely more alive, vital and powerful. O'Brien's mix brings out a lot of little things you had no idea was even there in the original mix, and he's also brought Eddie's vocals forward more in the mix, a big improvement over the buried vocals found on the original.
The biggest detraction? Jeremy. It turns out this was one of those songs on the original that was just about perfect. O'Brien seems to agree, since for most of the song, very little is changed. But towards the end, he has greatly pronounced the repeated "spoke in"s that were barely noticable on the original, and it becomes a giant distraction to the raw gutteral power the original had.
No surprise that Even Flow benefits greatly from a remix (hell, the band hated it so much they re-recorded it in 1992 and released that version as a b-side, and used it as the version released to radio). Release also improves, and stripping some of the reverb from Once makes that song sound like the absolute beast it is in a live setting. However, the overblown production did suit some of the original songs, most notably Alive, which is much less raw and edgy here. The same could be said of Black, which now sounds a bit too polished.
The six bonus tracks have all been readily available in the Pearl Jam online community for years, except for 2000 Mile Blues, something of a improvisational blues jam that outside of a rip roaring Mike McCready solo is nothing special.
Brother was released to radio to promote the re-release, and it went all the way to #1 on the Billboard rock radio charts. An instrumental version with a newly recorded guitar lead was released in 2003 on the rarities collection Lost Dogs, which had miffed a lot of longtime fans. It's a strong song, certainly stronger than something like Deep, and it's exclusion has always baffled many fans.
Likewise, Just a Girl has always been seen as a cool little rarity. Played live only once at their first ever show, its story features the same protagonist as Why Go. It's by far my favorite of the outtakes here. It's also the closest the band came to the hair metal inspired stylings of Mother Love Bone.
Both State of Love and Trust and Breath (here called Breath and a Scream) had their definitive versions on the Singles soundtrack, and the early demos here vary quite a bit. SOLAT is much slower, and Breath lacks the passion and power of the real thing.
Lastly, Evil Little Goat is just the band goofing around from October of 1990. Its hardly a real song, but rather a bit of an interesting look at the band's first week together in Seattle.
As for the DVD, it unfortunately continues the bit of Pearl Jam revisionist history that began with the aforementioned Lost Dogs release. As Lost Dogs took old songs and in some cases, featured new Vedder vocals from several years later (as well as some un-needed lyric changes, or in the case of Footsteps, an unnecessary harmonica), this performance of Unplugged is not even complete. It's missing the version of Rocking in the Free World, which means the bootleg version that's been out there for years is better to have (even with a counter at the bottom of the screen). But hey, ok, one song, and it's a cover, and, admittedly, there are better versions of that cover out there. Fine.
During the opening Oceans, you can clearly in the original film hear Eddie say "oh Beth" towards the end of the song, a reference to his wife at the time, Beth Liebling. That's been edited out to sound nothing like Beth. Beth was also removed from the Thank Yous in the deluxe edition. Maybe these are minor points, but what's next? When they redo Vs. and Vitalogy, will they use a cutout face of Jack Irons and post him over Dave Abbrusseze on the drums? I mean, to this day, Eddie's still making disparaging comments about Dave A (find a copy of the recent Berlin show and listen to his comments after the band plays Glorified G)
They also re-arranged the tracklisting to make the unforgettable version of Porch as the closing track. This would be fine, except during the Even Flow that precedes it on the DVD, you can clearly see the marker on Eddie's arm that he wouldn't write until the next song.
Maybe these are minor points, but if you are going to celebrate your legacy, you should let your legacy be what it is, and not try to recreate it into something it wasn't.
This is a nice package, and diehard fans who have yearned for a remixed Ten will be happy, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who had no idea Brother and Just a Girl even existed. I'm happy to have it in my collection, but it's certainly not a must for casual fans.
Pearl Jam released Ten on August 27, 1991. The album reached #2 on the Billboard 200 chart, sold over 12 million copies and became one of the cultural...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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