No Code by Pearl Jam
No Code is the fourth studio album by the American alternative rock band Pearl Jam, released on August 27, 1996 through Epic Records. Following a troubled tour for its previous album, Vitalogy (1994), in which Pearl Jam engaged in a much-publicized boycott of Ticketmaster, the band went into the studio to record its follow-up. The music on the record was more diverse than what the band had done on previous releases, incorporating elements of garage rock, worldbeat, psychedelia, and experimentalism. Although No Code debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, it left a large section of the band’s fanbase unsatisfied and quickly fell down the charts. Critical reviews were also mixed, with praise to the musical variety but the album being considered inconsistent. The album became the first Pearl Jam album to not reach multi-platinum status, receiving a single platinum certification by the RIAA in the United States. For its fourth album, Pearl Jam again worked with producer Brendan O'Brien, with whom they had worked on predecessors Vs. (1993) and Vitalogy (1994). No Code was the band's first album with drummer Jack Irons, who had joined the band as Vitalogy was being completed. Following the summer U.S. leg of the band's Vitalogy Tour, the band began work on No Code in Chicago, Illinois in July 1995 during the infamous Chicago heat wave. The Chicago sessions lasted a week at the Chicago Recording Company. During a break in a string of make-up dates for the 1995 tour the band went into the studio for a week-long session in New Orleans, Louisiana, where the band recorded "Off He Goes". The rest of the recording took place in the first half of 1996 in Seattle, Washington at Studio Litho, which is owned by guitarist Stone Gossard. The album was then mixed by O'Brien at his mixing facility at Southern Tracks in Atlanta, Georgia.
That Pearl Jam originally named themselves after the NBA player Mookie Blaylock makes a poetic kind of sense: Of all the bands to come out of the alternative-rock boom in the early ’90s, none felt so deeply connected to sports as they did—their focus, their fluidity, their kinetic energy and positive release. For as dark as the material on <i>Ten</i> is—portraits of homelessness (“Even Flow”) and mental illness (“Why Go”), family dysfunction (“Alive”) and teenage alienation elevated to physical violence (“Jeremy”)—the overall spirit of their 1991 debut is one of brightness and vitality, of rising above. As the story goes, singer Eddie Vedder—a gas station attendant in San Diego who’d never met his bandmates before joining them in Seattle—came up with his first round of lyrics for their demo tape while he was out surfing, his feet still covered in sand as he laid down vocals. Where decades of pop culture had split notions of male identity into macho and sensitive, jocks and nerds, Pearl Jam, in their own unwitting way, brought them together: Here were five very earnest young guys, desperate to take you above the rim.<br /> And for all the stereotypes of Seattle rock as grungy and monochromatic, <i>Ten</i> (its title a tribute to Blaylock’s jersey number) has a broad palette: syncopated hard rock (“Once”), fragile ballads (“Black”), Hendrix-indebted psychedelia (“Deep”). Where Kurt Cobain ironised conventional guitar solos by purposefully screwing his up, Mike McCready plays with the passion and enthusiasm of someone who still believes in them—a distinction that not only kept continuity with classic rock, but made Pearl Jam more akin to Guns N’ Roses and Metallica than, say, the Melvins. And while his subject matter was intimate, Vedder never sang like he belonged anywhere smaller than an arena, creating a prototype for basically every famous rock vocalist in his wake.<br /> He later worried it was all too much—too open, too personal, too vulnerable. But the lack of emotional distance is part of what makes <i>Ten</i> so distinct. Prior to Vedder joining the band, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had played in Mother Love Bone alongside vocalist Andy Wood, who died of a drug overdose in 1990. They were looking for a new beginning; Vedder was looking for a chance. Standing onstage at the Pinkpop festival two years later, in the summer of 1992, around the time that <i>Ten</i> was certified gold, Vedder, gasping for air, turns his Polaroid camera on a crowd in the tens of thousands. He’d later tell an interviewer backstage that it was overwhelming to look out at such a sea of people—as if, in disbelief, he’d needed those pictures as proof that it had really happened. At a moment when mainstream rock was in upheaval, Pearl Jam’s real rebellion was to live.
