Pearl Jam, 'Lightning Bolt,' and Diane Birch, 'Speak a Little Louder': Album reviews

Pearl Jam harks back to its original style for the band's 10th studio release.

Pearl Jam

“Lightning Bolt”

4 Stars

(Mechanic/Republic Records)

Pearl Jam reverts to type on its latest CD. While the band’s previous work, 2009’s “Backspacer,” peeled out with the leanest, fastest, and most positive-minded music of the group’s long career, “Lightning Bolt” works like a boomerang.

Much of it has the thick-bottomed rhythms, hard-nosed guitars and darkened tone of classic Pearl Jam. The echo comes at an apt time. Think about it: Pearl Jam titled its first CD, “Ten.” Now they’re releasing their 10th studio work.

Rest assured, the new disc offers some key sounds and sensibilities the band never would have found in its early-’90s breakthrough days. But mainly it pays homage to Pearl Jam’s core style, proving it to be remarkably durable and fresh.

In the concussively rocking “My Father’s Son,” righteous growler Eddie Vedder reinhabits the angry young man of his youth, railing at a psychopathic dad whose genes infect him. In “Pendulum” he grouses “easy come/easy go/easy left me a long time ago,” while the bass line broods through an essential grunge groove. “Swallowed Whole” repeats Vedder’s avowed Pete Townshend fetish, down to nicking Roger Daltrey's stutter.

Songs like the opener “Getaway” or the title track fire off riffs that stand with the band’s most involving. While Pearl Jam’s last CD kept every cut terse and broke fresh ground in new wave, here the songs snake on longer and only a few offer something new.

“Let the Records Play” coils around a blues-rock riff that could have been created by Peter Green in 1968, while “Sleeping by Myself” has a lonesome country gait unlike anything the band has ever cut. To boot, many songs spin in a more positive direction than a younger Vedder would have allowed, especially the finale, the rather sappy “Future Days.”

If all this makes for an unsurprising CD, the conformity makes sense. After all, Pearl Jam stands as the only top grunge band that never came up for air, as well as one of the few rock groups of the last 20 years still blessed with an undiminished audience. It seems that, all these years later, it’s enough that the band’s new music matches its high and pleasing standard.

Pearl Jam headlines Barclays Center Oct. 18 and 19.

Diane Birch

“Speak a Little Louder”

S-Curve Records

3 Stars

It’s too bad Diane Birch doesn’t have a time machine. If so, she could whisk herself back to a time when she’d be a guaranteed star.