CD of the Day

While the Cavs have been busy burying the Sixers with 3 pointers, I'm taking a break from sports to review one of the many CDs in my collection. In this instance, I’ll take a look at one of the defining CDs of the grunge era:

Pearl Jam - Ten

The grunge era of the early 90s took a while to really grow on me, but there were a few CDs by some great artists that helped me get into the pseudo genre and discover some of the genre’s more pure performers. Pearl Jam was one of those artists I mention that got me into the sounds from Seattle. Pearl Jam was a concoction of the band Mother Love Bone and San Diego vocalist Eddie Vedder that still puts out solid rock music to this day.

It all began with Pearl Jam with their debut album Ten. Ten was a bridge between the primal sounds of grunge and the accessible sounds of rock music that helped attract the masses and help the grunge movement take over the radio waves in the early 90s. Ten was a sonic statement from the Northwest that helped other legendary ground-breaking bands like Nirvana to gain more listeners (even though Nirvana already broke through with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).

Ten is a solid album all around with cuts that can damn near sum up the band’s entire career. That’s amazing when you consider this is a debut album, yet when you really think about it, this band has been growing since the founding fathers of the band started out in a punky band called Green River.

For those of you stuck under a rock, the classic song, “Jeremy” helped gain the band a giant audience as it was featured prominently on MTV at the time. It was a great song with deep meaning, which summed up the darker feelings of teen angst. While “Jeremy” was a great hit by the band, there were other songs on the album that helped propel the album to even greater heights like: “Alive”, “Black” (covered by Staind), “Even Flow”, and the scorching opener “Once”.

Ten was the finest release by Pearl Jam and is still a great listen to this day. I give this CD a 9 out of 10.