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Rolling Stone Magazine -- 1997. -- Pages:
By: David Fricke
Submitted by: Todd Adams
When did self determination become a sin in popular music? And so what if Eddie Vedder was a big man on campus in high school? If you can't reinvent - no, make that redefine yourself in rock and roll, then, as Jimi Hendrix once put it, "There ain't no life nowhere." "No Code" is definitely personality overload - a quadro-phrenic splatter of fuzz-box bedlam; sober acoustic contemplation; bumpy, twitchy pop; and, in the tidal rumble of "Present Tense," compelling emotional interrogation. It all works, too, as snapshot shocks of Pearl Jam's depth of energy and mood (the mad surge of "Lukin"; Vedder's closing bed time ballad "Around The Bend"), and as on impulse, messy whole - a kind of like life itself, really. "Off He Goes" may be as close, and as pointed, as Vedder has ever come to addressing the image - manufactured, unwarranted or otherwise - that now follows him around like a bad odor: "I wonder about his insides? It's like his his thoughts are too big for his size." Yet the physical and argumentative charge of "No Code" may be his best summarized in the way Vedder sings the chorus of "I'm Open," intonizing the words in a cheesy, enraptured way over and over again: "I'm Open, I'm Open..." Believe the music, even if you don't buy the rest of it.