I cried at a Pearl Jam album. Am I insane? Mental? High? No, just struck with so much emotion. Let me explain.

I was born in 1990. That means I’m only a year older than Pearl Jam’s first album (one of my personal favorites). Ten was an album I grew up listening to. Having a dad who loves rock does that to you. I’ve spent my life listening to Eddie Vedder and friends. Maybe that’s why I’m such an angry person. Anyone who listened through Riot Act and the self titled album had to feel some reprocussion after listing to those very political minded disks.

The era of Bush has passed, and the light of a new party shines bright. So what does Pearl Jam do? They rejoice about life, and write an album that gives you three absolutely glorious ballads about life, death, and love… And a lot of generic rock-pop?

Yeah. This album is poppy. If you’re one of those types that believed the only PJ album worth listening to is Ten, this one is not going to change your mind. Or maybe it will. This isn’t standard Pearl Jam fare. It carries nothing about politics. About rage against socity. This is an album that celebrates that the band has loved, and lost. And that’s absolutely beautiful.

The thing about this album is that while the lyrics do carry that emotion with them, the sound of it is nothing too catchy. Well, not fully. Uptempo pieces suffer from an overly radio friendly feel. I’m not at all a fan of lead single “The Fixer”. These just didn’t feel like songs that I could keep in my head for a long time. It all sounds like retreaded sounds that have come from bands before them, and Pearl Jam known better than that. Backspacer doesn’t forget that, luckily. You can come for the pop-rock, but if you don’t stay for the ballads, you might not have a heart.

Three tracks on this album remind me that this is the band I grew up loving. “Speed of Sound” looks back at a life seemingly wasted, and yet holding onto that chance of redemption. “Just Breathe” begs a loved one to stay with you until the very last breath. These songs are beautiful, simply gorgeous pieces hidden between the average rock around them. Then you get to the final piece, literally “The End”, and I just want to break down and cry for a few minutes; This 18 year old college freshman, sobbing In his dorm. A lesson in the value of life, and how quickly it, like the song itself, can end. This is a song by the same people who yelled at the world for two decades. This is the band that wrote a song called “World Wide Suicide”. And then they pull at my heart strings like this? Wow.

Those three tracks make a seemingly average album like Backspacer into a treasure. Those guys are in their 40′s now. I guess they had to cool off sometime. This is an album not just for Pearl Jam fans, but anyone who has the slightest love still for the message a song can convey. I didn’t enjoy every second of Backspacer, but when I was enjoying it, I was enjoying some of the most emotional music I have heard this year, if not, perhaps this decade.