If there’s one thing you can always count on Pearl Jam to do, it’s their ability to completely alienate their fanbase’s expectations. With the exception of their first album, Ten, the band has always strived to create the weirdest, out-of-fashion, and radio-averse songs on subsequent albums. Themes dealing with love, greif, depression, and triumph all coalesce to present their die-hard loyal fanbase with something new every time, even if it means throwing out all preconceived notions of grunge in exchange for something more ethereal, hippie, or downright ugly. If every other rock band is playing by the rules, we will always have Pearl Jam around to bend them backwards again.
For these reasons, Yield remains one of my favorite Pearl Jam album’s to date. Critics often speak of it as the band’s “return to form,” but their off-key riffs and even spoken word poetry leave a lot of scraps from albums like Ten and Vs. on the table in exchange for a glimpse into what was to come after. Push Me, Pull Me remains one of Pearl Jam’s most divisive works: the song’s heavy use of odd time signatures and spoken word messaging left a bad taste in the mouth’s of many who were told that Given to Fly was going to be a “return to the old Pearl Jam, man!” In fact, cuts like this prove just how in-ordinary the album really was, as this was the only track on the album that gained any significant radio airplay.
Push Me, Pull Me maintains a strange, almost ghastly switch between 3/4 and 4/4 time signatures. Drummer Jack Irons intentionally guides the song into this territory to match Eddie Vedder’s growling, monotonic vocals, which deal with the consequences of life and death as if the listener is around a campfire with the band during the session. All the while, additional guitar loops and samples add into the song to create an overdubbed porridge of sheer noise. By the end of the song, the noise is so indistinguishable that it actually almost sounds coherent. There is an air of completeness as the song, and hence the album, approaches its end. It’s as if the band is out of ideas for the entire Yield concept, and Push Me, Pull Me is the mess holding it all together. It’s an unnerving, ugly tune that somehow makes sense and, strangely but surely, stamps is mark as one of the best in Pearl Jam’s vast grunge/avant-garde catalogue.