Eddie Vedder - Earthling

Eddie Vedder Earthling, a dad rock masterpiece, or a masturbatory solo album just because you can afford to hire Stevie Wonder and Elton John then name check them in your song about a piano being a married woman who lets all the men fondle her in the basement while Ringo watches, i mean bangs on the drums? 

Spoiler alert, it's both those things at the same time. Not gonna lie, it feels a whole lot like that David Duchovney choose your own adventure album, Hell or Highwater. The songs are completely hit or airball, he doesn't actually mispronounce any words outside the ocassionally hilarious wrong vowel sound (dark sounds a lot like dork), and i don't think any of it actually deserved the postludic recall of random lyrics that weren't particularly inspired the first go round. 

Pretty confusing when i say it's actually a pretty good album, huh? Don't get me wrong, 3.5/13 is 73% suck as far as the songs are concerned, but a fantastic album consisting if 100% terrible songs is theoretically possible, and when the concept is as straightforward as proclaiming Eddie Vedder a humanoid who lives on the same planet i do, then there's really not much you can screw up. 

Now, this review is totally unfair because A) i literally just listened to The Album by Boygenius, and B) this is not a Pearl Jam album. Skip the first point, Pearl Jam is a very specific thing and only the verses on one song from Earthling could ever hope to work in that context. But, seeing as i have absolutely zero to draw from in terms of Eddie Vedder not being the frontman of Pearl Jam, it's entirely possible for him to be a crummy songwriter. He does have 2 other solo albums, but i'm not going to listen to them for context. He's a fantastic Pearl Jam songwriter, but again that is a very specific thing that only he can do. Nobody else writes Pearl Jam songs, is what i'm saying, it's a niche specialty. Songs that aren't Pearl Jam songs though, that's everybody else's territory, so we just went straight to the 10M high dive without much of a warm up. The pool's not empty, but that doesn't mean it's safe to dive, you know? 

Still, we need some proper perspective, i mean even the crappiest song Eddie writes is going to be tangibly better than 80% of random dads torturing their families with an impromptu acoustic living room set, but that doesn't mean they're de facto good, merely comparatively better than most. Also remember, right now famous people in particular are kind of forced to be as blatant as possible about which side of the sociopolitical Berlin Wall they stand on or else we'll all assume they're total right-wing nutjobs. All that being said, i imagine it's not easy for Eddie to even approach descriptions of functional human relationships, let alone sing about them, so i'll let a fair bit of the goopy new age love is magic stuff slide. 

I can't let the opener slide though, the astronaut schlock is total cringe and it sounds like his kids bought him a Words That Sound Like Science thesaurus for Father's Day, 2021. The resounding message is "science good," however, so i cannot argue that this song fails to properly deliver that message. The rest of them are the same way, however awkward and poorly worded, the songs make sense for what they're about. 

The music is where this album actually shines. I'm sticking to it, 70% of the lyrics are dumb, but 100% of the music is great. Sounds like a real band, sounds like they had fun, the melodies are catchy, the harmonies are lush and inventive, Eddie is just simply in way over his head trying to sing about things that aren't abject human tragedy. He sells it though, his performance is great, it's just that he's performing lyrics that sound like half completed high school English class homework. The 30% he actually worked on are great, it's the 70% he frantically scrawled during the morning bus ride that leave everything to be desired. 

Am i being too hard on Eddie Vedder? Maybe, but no. Everything else is really good, so the crappy rhyming words with themselves and nonsensical allusions smell all the more odious (looking at you, The Haves). They sound like songs he wrote because it was take your dad to school for show and tell day and he was like "oh crap, i'm Eddie Vedder, can't sing about rats or dicks or dead girlfriends, guess it's time to step well outside my wheelhouse." 

But does that make it a bad album? No, no it doesn't. The concept is stepping outside of Pearl Jam and collaborating with different people to create something different. It succeeds by every metric of success, and not once did i feel the need to skip to the next song. And the next song was different and interesting, just not lyrically. But even there, i can't actually say any of it is worse than Volbeat's awkward turns of phrase, and i think we can all agree the bar is set somewhere down around The Violent's Fly On The Wall: how is this make you feeling? Well, i feel like however vague and/or unclever, these lyrics don't sound like they were copy-pasted from google translate, so the worst i can call them is mediocre. 

Forget all of that though, the biggest problem with Earthling is that the cover screams epic sci-fi fantasy space opera with Eddie Vedder as the protagonist, but it ends up being Eddie Vedder the generic rockstar very nearly but not entirely convincingly crooning for 48 minutes. The theme evaporates immediately after liftoff, but we're stuck in the tuna can with wide awake rocketman for the long haul. 

And yet, even there the concept can totally handle it. He's just a dumb dude from Earth adrift and singin' songs across the cosmos. That concept works even better if the songs are bad, dumbass Earth problems humans invented 'cause they don't know better. Maybe it is genius, or at the very least on par with Joe Walsh's You Bought It You Name It. 

See? Pretty good album whether you like it or not.