Pearl Jam's Ten turns 35, and Clash puts the album back inside 1991

Pearl Jam's debut album Ten is 35 years old, and Clash has marked it with a spotlight that puts the record back into the year it came from rather than treating it as a standalone classic.

The framing is 1991 as a seven-month detonation, running from Dinosaur Jr's fuzzed-out records in February through to Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger in October, with Nevermind, Gish and Blood Sugar Sex Magik in between. Ten arrived in late August, on a day the piece notes nobody particularly noticed at the time.

What Clash argues separated it from the rest of that year was where it came from. The band was formed out of grief. Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in March 1990, weeks before that band's major label debut was due, leaving guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament with music and nowhere to put it. They recorded demos and eventually found a singer in Eddie Vedder, then a San Diego surfer and gas station attendant who wrote lyrics overnight to a cassette they sent him.

Rolling Stone en Espanol marked the same anniversary with an oral history by Brian Hiatt in which the band and their collaborators walk through the making of the record. Gossard, 24 at the time, describes writing an album's worth of material within months of Wood's death, without vocal melodies or lyrics, on the quiet certainty that he would find another singer worth the songs.

He also describes the odds. Mother Love Bone had signed a record deal after fewer than ten shows, the kind of instant success that annoyed every other band in Seattle, and winning that lottery twice was not a reasonable expectation. What encouraged him was the scene around him, from Mark Arm's Mudhoney to Soundgarden.

Clash's conclusion is that Ten endures not because it was the loudest record in a loud year but because it was the most human one. Against Nevermind's punk velocity and Gish's serrated ambition, what the debut had was the blues, and a band that was surviving something rather than arriving.

That reading also explains why the follow-ups went where they did. Five years later the band would make the record The Quietus has just called grunge's Kid A moment, an album built to shrink the audience Ten had won them. Both sit in the site's rock coverage.