Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
Black Hole Star/Tales from the Blues Cocoons
Schumann, Dvorak: Piano Concertos
Music: Straight Shooter [Original recording remastered]
The Greater Wrong of the Right
Amazon.com
Pearl Jam's unprecedented documentation of their Europe 2000 tour has done more than offer their fans an affordable alternative to music pirates; it effectively ensures their stature as one of rock's greatest live acts. Recorded before an unusually ecstatic audience at Milan's Fila Forum, the album finds the band playing off the crowd's good vibe with wild, sometimes antic abandon. Building from one of the tour's favored openers, Binaural's "Of the Girl," with the crowd hanging on every word, the vibe grows as the crowd joins in on "Small Town" and a number of others. The band seems unusually energetic, with Mike Mcready repeatedly giving in to the temptation to make like a soaring guitar god. Eddie Vedder introduces a driving version of "MFC" from Yield by telling the crowd that he wrote it in Italy after falling in love there. "But," he notes, "she had four wheels and was called a Mini." A great feel-good show from a band once notorious for its dour shoe gazing--maybe it really is the dawn of a new millennium. --Jerry McCulley