Album recommendation: Lightning Bolt by Pearl Jam

The vaping giraffe is a music addict as well. So today I'm taking a break from being frustrated with government officials that keeps on repeating what I find go be an incredibly bad line of arguments, and just give you an album recommendation instead.

Pearl Jam has always been one of my favourite bands, introduced to me back in '93 when VS was released. I instantly fell in love with their music ran of and bought TEN as soon as I had saved up enough money. I was 15 back then so I my income was limited. I remember using my birthday money buying a bootleg called The 5 musketeers, containing a studio recording of one of my live favourites Yellow Ledbetter. Found an ad on teletext (anyone remember that), had to call a guy in Stavanger, and he sent me a list of all the Pearl Jam bootlegs he could get me in the post, and I remember the feeling when I called him and placed the order. Aaahh... it was slow and checking the empty mailbox every day was a pain, but the feeling when it finally got there and I played the CD for the first time... magic. I mean I'm all for spotify and online music and having access to everything everywhere, but I kind of miss the feeling of putting a new CD in the player that I had been waiting a long time for and worked hard to be able to buy. So... I'm still go out and buy CD's from time to time :)

Anyway, this was supposed to be an album recommendation right? Well, one of my favourite 2013 albums has got to be Lightning Bolt by Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam has changed quite a lot over the years and their sound still keeps evolving, but one of the things I think they do best in the class is keeping a good mix of totally different songs in their albums but still making you feel they belong in the same album. I loved the 2009 album Backspacer, with loads of contrasts, with up tempo songs like The Fixer and the incredibly beautiful melancholy in Just Breathe, creating the contrasts in the album that for me makes Pearl Jam one of my absolute favourites. So, I had high hopes for the Lightning Bolt album that was released in October 2013, and I was not disappointed. In many ways I think that Lightning Bolt and Backspacer are two of the closest Pearl Jam albums when it comes to style. Lightning Bolt has many of the same contrast with uptempo rock and roll tracks like Mind your manners, the semi-acoustic Eddie Vedderism in Sleeping By Myself, that reminds me of Vedders solo soundtrack album Into the wild, and the melodic vocals in Sirens. Also gotta love the way Pearl Jam picks up traces from old albums, Mind your matters could easily also fit in on the Vitalogy album.

So, I can safely put the "Recommended by Vaping Giraffe"-stamp on Lightning Bolt. Now get your spotify up and give it a listen. And if you want to dig into Pearl Jam some more, check out their website pearljam.com which is pretty good as well.