I liked their first three albums when they came out, although they bore me now due to overexposure. Those first three albums got progressively weirder and weirder, after the third one it was obvious the band got some record company pressure to can the artsiness and get back to making rock-by-numbers, because that's where they've been stuck ever since. I don't care one iota for anything they've recorded after "Vitalogy", I think somewhere along the line they simply lost their songwriting ability, actually even most of that third album is filler now I think about it.
Pearl Jam's sound has also heavily dated. Not the band's fault, but the fault of thousands of clones that sprang up all around the world, flogging that "sound" to death and making me thoroughly sick of it. For a few years there people doing that marble-mouthed Eddie Vedder voice was all I would ever fucking see whenever I got sent new original music or went to see a new original band live. Every single day - "oh look another one who wants to be Eddie Vedder". Of course none of these trend-following bands ever got anywhere because the grunge ship had well and truly sailed by 1995 and no new bands in that style were even being looked at by the industry by the time I got into that line of work.
