No Code

Log:
2024-06-03 *

* I've long been ambivalent on this one. It seems that I just needed to get older. Like its brilliant, Polaroid-based CD packaging (long gone from my life, but thinking back on it now...), it's a jumbled, messy collage of tones and ideas—ideas, in particular, that hit different in your 30s. Though not the sort of wonderfully balanced, full experience that Ten and Vitology have always been, there is something very present, existential and fleeting in No Code. The play and flash of youth are wearing off of the band and meditation and distress are setting in: Who am I when I am no longer superficially valuable (i.e. cool or vital or young)? What is my deeper substance? The album resonates with that personal change in perspective for me. It's trying a myriad of things in a way that feels like maturation: Pearl Jam examining everything they are as a means of finding what is true within the changing landscape of their sound and what they want out of their creative expression, the work of their lives—no different than sorting out what your own life will be when you arrive 3 decades deep with all the material of your own potential to consider, to focus into a positive path of power beyond the clamor of young adulthood. Anyway, funny to me is how I remembered it all as a mild-tempered record when there is actually a fairly even assortment of aggressive sounds, which feeds this whole introspective vibe. It's interesting to look at where your thoughts were half a lifetime back as the very same media speaks to you a different way, a way that you were unable to conceive of then. It just wasn't as hard as Vs! Yes, kid, but there's something to that—and it feels like I've caught up to what that is, or at least what it is to me. (It's also possible that this might be what mellowing with age looks like—hahaha.) Last note: "Mankind" might just be the most embarrassingly beige-sounding song from P.J.'s early catalog. I guess it could just be the harbinger of all the inevitable personal cringe we will have to surrender ourselves to as we grow ever further away from the zeitgeist and its youth, per this whole idea I have about what No Code is doing. But yuck. What kind of post-grunge shit was that? Lol.