10 Great Songs On Otherwise Terrible Albums

There comes point in Pearl Jam's career where they started to hit a brick wall. While they may have hit the ground running with albums like Ten and Vs., the weird instrumental passages littered throughout Vitalogy made everything feel a bit strange by comparison. Little did we know that was just the beginning of the madness when No Code came around.

From cover to cover, this is the most perplexing album in Pearl Jam's career, toeing the line between too weird to take seriously and too downtempo to get all that worked up about. For all it's faults though, the album at least opened fairly strong with Hail, Hail, which felt like the Pearl Jam that we knew and loved. Though not necessarily the most arena ready song of their career, the rapid fire guitar assault feels like something that you would hear being pumped out of a gnarly garage in the Pacific Northewest.

If this were the ethos of the entire record, No Code would have made a lot sense, before going into downtempo rock territory on experiments like In My Tree and Off He Goes just a few songs later. Even though Eddie Vedder made a point to get less personal on this outing, it's nice that they at least gave us a snippet for the hardcore fans to latch onto.