MUSIC: IDENTITY CRISIS

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The guys in the Seattle-based rock band Pearl Jam are only in their 30s, but the group's newest album, No Code, makes it sound as if they're having a midlife crisis. The songs on the CD flail this way and that, screamingly loud on the vocal-chord-stripping song Lukin, restrained and dreamy on the ballad Off He Goes and fuzzily philosophical on the mostly laid-back number Present Tense. Sonic variety can be a good thing--the Smashing Pumpkins' brilliant double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, also veered all over the map--but too few of the songs on the Pearl Jam CD explore the musical possibilities they suggest in any kind of definitive or provocative manner. No Code is the sound of a band looking for a new direction, but too comfortable and cautious to follow through on its vision.

Instead, the band seems content to follow trails blazed by others. The spiritualized, bass-heavy Who You Are is a solid number, but it clearly owes a lot to Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, with whom Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder worked on the sound track to the film Dead Man Walking. Other songs are even more derivative. The countrified garage rocker Smile sounds like a Neil Young tune, right down to the harmonica solo (Pearl Jam worked with Young on his 1995 album, Mirror Ball); it's pleasant enough, but it lacks the ornery soul of the genuine article. Let's hope this is just a brief detour and that the next time out, Pearl Jam will find its way back to the gutsy inventiveness that deservedly made it the most popular band of the early '90s. --C.J.F.