This week it was announced that the long time drummer of Pearl Jam, Matt Cameron was leaving the group.
Matt Cameron first gained success as a member of Soundgarden. He joined the group in 1986 and appeared on all of their studio records. If you want to take a deep-dive into Matt Cameron’s time with Soundgarden this Drumeo video is excellent.
Matt Cameron’s drumming is powerful and fluid. Even though the music was very heavy, it often included odd time signatures. Matt played the odd times so smoothly that you might not even realize that the songs are not in 4/4.
One of my favorite examples is “Outshined” off of 1991’s Badmotorfinger. The slow heavy part at the end is in 19/4…but that didn’t stop it from being a huge hit. I attribute that to Matt Cameron making it not sound jagged:
Matt Cameron also wrote some of the songs Soundgarden recorded (though not any of their biggest hits). Perhaps my all-time favorite Cameron-penned Soundgarden song is “Mailman” from Superunknown. The heaviness is off the charts! Check out this peak performance on British television in 1996:
Speaking of 1996, that was the year of Soundgarden’s final tour before they broke up for the first time.
Matt Cameron started his own band called Wellwater Conspiracy, that was influenced by 60s psych rock and also did some studio moonlighting (He played “For Martha” on Smashing Pumpkin’s Adore and “Narayan” on Prodigy’s Fat of the Land for example).
But his next big move was joining Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam’s drummer at the time, Jack Irons, hating touring and quit midway through their tour supporting Yield. So Matt Cameron joined them initially just as a touring member (you can hear him on the live record Live On Two Legs). However it worked so well, that he ended up joining the band full time! He ended up playing with them for 27 years…way longer than his combined time with Soundgarden (between the breakups he spent 18 years overall with that group). His first record with Pearl Jam was Binaural which is today’s pick!
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Binaural is named because they initially wanted to record the entire record using binaural recording techniques with producer Tchad Blake. The group decided that the heavier songs (on which there were many on this record) didn’t sound as good using that technique.
The song I think that utilized the Binaural technique the best was “Nothing As It Seems”:
It’s a beautiful song that really sets a mood. A great live performance at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit in 1996 shows that it was also great in concert:
Another song that benefits from being recorded in binaural is “About The Girl”:
The thing I really like about the album Binaural are the heavy rockers. In fact the first three songs on the record are like a runaway train: “Breakerfall”, “God’s Dice” and “Evacuation”!
“Evacuation” was actually written by Matt Cameron! You could tell he loved playing it live. The Pearl Jam live DVD Touring Band 2000 has great drum-cam video of “Evacuation”:
“Breakerfall” was also a awesome in a live setting:
Oddly, none of these songs were released as singles. Only “Nothing As It Seems” and “Light Years” were officially released as singles. That didn’t stop Pearl Jam from playing a different song on Late Show With David Letterman. They played “Grievance” which deals with the dangers of technology (still quite a relevant topic nowadays!).
Binaural also contains “Soon Forget”, which is the first example of Eddie Vedder playing a ukulele. He later put out an entire album of him playing songs on a ukulele on an album aptly titled Ukulele Songs.
Perhaps my favorite song on Binaural is “Rival”. It was written as a response to the Columbine school shooting. This live version of the 2000 Pinkpop Festival is the definitive performance (I’ve linked to it because for some reason it is restricted from being embedded on a webpage).
Binaural kicked off Matt Cameron’s very successful tenure in Pearl Jam. There have been plenty of highlights since this record, but Binaural* remains one of my favorite latter-day Pearl Jam albums. It’s seemingly an underrated record in their overall catalog and I’m not sure why. It’s basically a fifty minute example of why Pearl Jam is one of the greatest bands to come out of the Seattle grunge scene.
