Converge frontman Jacob Bannon has taken part in the ongoing series of artist reviews over at Thetalkhouse.com. His entry finds him reviewing Pearl Jam‘s latest release “Lightning Bolt” with an excerpt from it available below:
“When it rains, it pours.
I’m writing this while laying on a friend’s living room, recuperating from a knee surgery brought on from years of abuse in my band. As a teen, I took the unsaid lesson that bands like Black Flag taught me quite literally; play hard or go home. And for over two decades I’ve done this, and I’m physically paying for it now.
How does this relate to Pearl Jam? Don’t worry, I’ll get there.
Pearl Jam has never appealed to me in the traditional sense. By the time they were taking root in popular culture, I irrationally despised them. The major label marketing machine behind bands pigeonholed as “grunge” practiced overkill without prejudice, sucking the life out of many of the artists that they came in contact with.
Even if certain bands were appealing in the primordial form of “grunge” (Skin Yard, Big Chief, Mudhoney and others) my infatuations quickly deflated with the exploitation of the subgenre. Too much of anything can be a bad thing.
I was a teenage music fanatic in the early ’90s, a golden era for aggressive music. Back then, I was recuperating from a broken kneecap. I was laid up for six months, and music became an intense obsession of mine, both as a player and as a devout listener. I would spend hours on end, lost in my head, thinking about the kind of band I wanted and the qualities I wanted to carry one day.
Even then, major labels couldn’t piss on my leg and tell me it was raining. I may have known nothing about most things in life, but I felt I could determine if a band was the real deal or not with pinpoint accuracy. I had a voracious appetite for the real thing (still do) and I no tolerance for poseurs, an epithet that even now, I consider a fate worse than death…’
You can read on over at Thetalkhouse.com.
