Houses of the Holy: Christopher Pearson Reviews 'Yield' and 'Temple of the Morning Star'

By Christopher Pearson | Wednesday, February 18, 1998

In 1996, business executives scoffed up three million copies of a pop management book by James Bellasco called Flight of the Buffalo. In a short pointed critique, Bellasco decried the increasing reliance of corporate workers on one dynamic individual to control and guide the company's course.

During the conquest of the American West, he noted, frontiersmen soon discovered that buffaloes are remarkably easy to kill for such large ornery beasts. If they killed the head buffalo, the rest of the herd, utterly dependent on the leader, didn't know how to react and were quickly slaughtered.

Too many people today, Bellasco opined, are like the buffalo. Oblivious to their surroundings, they are content to simply follow the leader. This does not portend well, he declared, for any business or industry.

In the pop music industry forgettable singles by disposable bands may be the lead buffalo, heading full gallop for the nearest craggy cliff.

In the past month Spin, Rolling Stone, and even The New York Times have each bemoaned the stunning rise to dominance of singles as entities independent of the artist who recorded them. One song fueled by a video and radio airplay, the press complains, is now what sells music.

The band, or album as a whole, is merely an aside. Third Eye Blind may be the name of the band but it's the song 'Semi-Charmed Life' that is familiar, even if only informally as the 'Doo doo doo song.'

Without a single — a song consumers already know from radio and MTV — to act as cattle prod, they will often pass on a new album, even if the record is the new release by an artist whose albums they have purchased previously.

So powerful is the trend that Pearl Jam, who for the past five years have defiantly refused to make music videos or to release singles to radio, has finally softened its stance.

The first single off their new album Yield, 'Given to Fly,' is receiving major radio airplay and the band has tentative plans to make a video of the song directed by Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire). Pearl Jam will even play several shows in support of the new disc at venues controlled by Ticketmaster, a company whose alleged monopoly on concert ticket prices they have spent years condemning.

The band maintains that their principles haven't changed but concede that it no longer had the will to sustain its various crusades.

Following the platinum success (nine times over) of their debut album Ten in 1991, Pearl Jam had attempted to seal themselves off from the traditional lifestyle of a major label rock band: No interviews, no music videos, no world tours. Instead, they calmly released an album every two years and mounted their high profile campaign against Ticketmaster.

When Pearl Jam first anointed themselves the scourge of MTV and ticket cartels, I thought the band confused. They made a choice when they signed with Epic, I reasoned: money and the opportunity for a wider audience over the 'credibility' of being put out by Sub Pop or Touch&Go.

As Ten brilliantly demonstrated, Pearl Jam was and is a good, often great, mainstream rock band. They don't subsist on Meow-mix and city water. They don't live together in a one room apartment and they don't play shows where they outnumber the audience. They were ashamed of their own success.

The burdens Pearl Jam placed on themselves to maintian the 'independent' ideal was no asset to their music. 1995's Vitalogy was at times moving but frustratingly uneven. And 1996's No Code was worse still.

Sparse and plodding, it betrayed a band grown accustomed to selling its newest albums based on the strength of its old ones.

Coincidental or not with Pearl Jam's more relaxed attitude, Yield abruptly halts that decline. The band has rediscovered the songcraft so conspicuously lacking on No Code and delivered the mature work of a band finally able to concentrate on its music. New drummer Jack Irons blends seamlessly into the mix. Ranging widely in style, from the raspy fast tempo punk of 'Pilate' to the thoughtful balladry of 'Low Light,' Yield somehow manages to succeed on all its divergent fronts.

The first single, 'Given to Fly,' egregiosuly borrows from Led Zeppelin's 'Going to California' but puts a new face on a familiar tune with the crashing guitar chords over the chorus, 'oh he's flying whole...a human being that was given to fly'.

Blustery and hard driving, the bassist Jeff Ament-penned 'Do the Evolution' features Eddie Vedder infectiously screaming 'It's evolution baby.'

Even my least favorite song, the more spoken than sung studio experiment 'Push Me Pull Me' has appeal in its faded background chorus and McCready and Gossard's strummed guitars.

At the opposite end of the commercial spectrum from Pearl Jam lies Today is the Day (TITD). Its newest and finest album, Temple of the Morning Star, continues to stare at the back end of 50,000 copies sold five months after its release. Besides joining with Texas is the Reason and World is my Trouble to mount a novel trend in band nomenclature towards complete sentences, the Nashville, Tennessee-based TITD has attracted attention mostly because leaders of metal's avant garde such as Nine Inch Nails and the Deftones have extolled Temple for its bizarre amalgam of punk, metal, and industrial strength noise.

Released in November of last year by Noise Amphetamine Reptile Records, the former distributor of the proto-grunge Seattle band the Melvins, Temple opens sedately with the haunting title track.

An acoustic dirge with only one lyric 'I cannot be...what you want you to be,' it slowly fades, as if giving the album's listener a last chance to reconsider before the coming flood. For the next 16 songs, the band piles layers upon layers of paralyzing and raging riffs interspersed with samples from B- movies, evangelists, and Willie Nelson.

Above the the din, frontman and guitarist Steve Austin hurls his impossibly distorted vocals as bassist Chris Reeser and drummer Mike Hyde churn through thick walls of sound. From 'Rabid Lassie' to 'The Man Who Loves to Hurt Himself,' the tracks are short, harsh and unremitting but as searing mediations on all things loud they are unparalleled.

In a genre plagued by camp Satanism and mallet-headed imagination, Temple of the Morning Star turns the metal clichés inside out and summons its own stark vision of a world decayed, or as Donald Tardy prefers 'the End Complete.'

Uncompromising and undiluted, Temple of the Morning Star screams bloody murder from start to finish.

Houses of the Holy: Christopher Pearson Reviews 'Yield' and 'Temple of the Morning Star'

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