It happened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and now it's happened to Pearl Jam. They've gotten old and experienced and boring as bat shit. Wiser perhaps, better in some ways, but boring.

After more than a decade of being one of the biggest bands in the world Pearl Jam are now absolutely, completely, mind blowingly standard. The lyrics are great. The music is flawless, experimental even, artsy if you will. There are probably 200 guitars used on this album and they are all probably worth more than $10,000 each.

I ask you, when you've been a multi millionaire rock star for longer than some teenagers have been alive, have toured the world a billion times, have experimented with eastern music, have made albums like Ten and Vs, how much more exciting can you get?

Maybe this is Pearl Jam's middle period where they just keep on keeping on and don't waiver from the trodden path, maybe in a few more years time they'll suddenly release an album out of the blue and it will take the world by storm and they will be justified for being around for so long. Like the Rolling Stones, like Bob Dylan, like U2 before them. Maybe.

Grunge died a long time ago and perhaps fittingly, so did Soundgarden and Nirvana. But out of their ashes came the Foo Fighters and now Audioslave - direct descendants of the Seattle sound, and still exciting, fresh and relevant. For whatever reason Pearl Jam have survived and haven't done anything really exciting since Vitalogy in 1994. I would argue that Pearl Jam are now irrelevant. If you liked their last few albums you'll probably like Riot Act. If you weren't phased then you'll probably hear them on the radio for a bit and then they'll fade away until the next album and you won't even notice.

There's a few stand-out tracks like 'You Are', the 1.05 minute hindu chant thing 'Arc', 'All or None' and 'Bushleaguer', which have something resembling spirit, but there's absolutely nothing here to rival the energy and, gulp, vitalogy of even the not so well known tracks off their first three albums. Maybe it takes a while to get into it, but the best tracks seem to be hidden away at the end of the album, (like Immortality on Vitalogy) maybe if you played it backwards it would be better. I don't know.

This may boring as batshit, but even batshit is still powerful enough to eat through the paint on your car if you leave it there long enough. Maybe that's what this album is all about.