Value-Priced Pearl Jam

With Opie and Anthony finishing out their XM suspension and Ron and Fez gone once more from the public airwaves, I've had a bit more time than usual to check out some new tunes, so maybe that explains why the music entry in my Recent Experiences sidebar has been getting updated a bit more than usual. And this week, my nostalgia trip back to my high school years continued (God only knows why, my life sucked until I was about 21) with Pearl Jam's greatest hits collection Rearviewmirror. (In the interest of full disclosure, I enjoyed their first three albums (Ten, Vs., Vitalogy) very much as they were being released, No Code sucked hard, and the last Pearl Jam album I bought was Yield, which was so-so compared to the aforementioned Big Three.) Also, I have no problem differentiating an artist's work from their political views, so if you're going to post "PERL JAM SUXXX GEORGE BUSHH ROX" in my comments, then skip the rest of this post, go back to threshing the hayfields, and come back next week when I make fun of Hilary or Obama or something.

Rearviewmirror is a 2-CD set with all of their "big" songs, cleverly divided into a disc of hard rock and a disc of mellower stuff. As a "fan dropout", there were quite a few songs on here that were new to me, but nothing on here to change the opinions I'd already formed about their first five albums. I did enjoy a couple of the post-1998 tracks on the hard rock disc, but was reminded of how much I despised their cover of "Last Kiss" and how overplayed "Wishlist" was back in its day. The saving grace of this CD is its low price tag--$11 on Amazon.com for a double CD isn't too bad. It's worth picking up if you've skipped a couple of their albums (it's far cheaper than iTunes on a per-song basis), or if you lack the capability to rip your CDs (or work your way onto the RIAA's "naughty" list) and burn your own compilation album.