Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle
11.28.05

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

Scenery
Neil Young, Mirror Ball

OK. Here we have one more entry in the seemingly neverending series of songs that rode some past wave of musical enthusiasm, only to come up pretty short when evaluated in the cold light of 2005.

The wave in question this time is my (and I know for a fact it wasn't just me) mid-90s belief that everything Pearl Jam touched was gold. Since there were only a couple of Pearl Jam studio albums available, I was mega-jazzed when they acted as Neil Young's backing band and spent roughly a year afterwards telling everyone I could that Mirror Ball was nothing short of a message from God. Yeah, I was annoying back in those days.

Looking back, even the songs that I considered to be Mirror Ball's peak ("I'm the Ocean," "Downtown," "Throw Your Hatred Down") are really just sort of ok. The ones that I would've considered just sort of ok back in the day are actually pretty bad. And that includes "Scenery."

For starters, when it popped up on my iPod, I was shocked to see that it was damn near 9 minutes long; I'd assumed that it was a 3-minute song that just felt like it lasted forever. The song goes nowhere, with Pearl Jam bashing out big chords over a plodding beat underneath free-associative Neil young lyrics and the sort of guitar wankery that my friends and I used to refer to as "Stud Guitar." This, unfortunately, is the sort of ponderous, boring song that gives Neil young a bad name.

If I were in a bar and the band broke into a cover of "Scenery," I would probably break the bottom off of my beer bottle and fight all comers. BRING IT ON, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):

1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2. "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
4. "Sliver (live)," Nirvana
5. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
6. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
7. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
8. "The Calming Sea," Beachwood Sparks
9. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
10. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
11. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
12. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
13. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
14. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
15. "Scenery," Neil Young and Pearl Jam
16. "We Got The," The Beastie Boys
17. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
18. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
19. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma