Dancing with the clairvoyants.

I've been a huge and unapologetic Pearl Jam fan from the get-go (the number of bootlegs I burned onto cassette tape in the first half of the nineties was ridiculous in my efforts to grab every piece of music that I could*) but have gradually lost touch with the band over the years as they slowed down the pace of new albums and focused on their (always excellent) live shows.

This new song off their soon-to-be-released Gigaton seems to indicate that era may be ending as the band appears to be opening up their sound more than they have since Vitaology dropped and confused many (while, I would argue, delighted many more).


*I remember when the Soldier Field show was released in a couple of Chicago indie record stores, I begged Photogal to lend me the money to pick it up since she had a "big money" job and I was still slugging it out part-time creating designs for a company that sold trophies both big and small. "I was at that show!" I said. "It's only fifty bucks!" I said, at a time when $50 was prohibitively expensive for something like a compact disc, illegal or not, and I was definitely not making enough money to justify such a huge expenditure on my own. I did eventually get it all on my own, and it was worth every penny.