My name is Martin Edlund, and I am a Pearl Jam fan. This isn’t an easy thing to admit, especially for a music critic. But try as I might, there’s no escaping it. Eddie Vedder was my grunge gateway drug, my junior high anti-hero. I owned a pair of concert-only steel-toed boots (not those yuppie Doc Martens, mind you) just like his, and wore vintage lumberjack shirts with the sleeves ripped off. My leather biker wallet was attached to my belt with a chain so I wouldn’t lose it while crowd surfing to “Evenflow” – something I actually did. More than once.

Like anyone, I have my excuses. When “Ten” came out in 1991, I was a ninth-grader already heavily dependent on MTV, which is to say a prime target. To be caught up in the excitement of dirty flannel and slow-motion hair tossing seemed like a generational obligation and, living on the outskirts of Seattle as I did, a civic duty.

I only learned to be embarrassed about it later, when I realized that “alternative rock” had ossified into a bankable pop genre (if it didn’t begin that way) and mosh pits had become just another venue for high school bullies to beat up on the class misfits (who quickly moved on to less pedestrian underground fare). Then, with 1994’s “Vitalogy,” the whole thing mercifully blew over.

Before starting this review, I hadn’t listened to Pearl Jam for the better part of a decade, but I could never quite put it out of my head. On more occasions than I care to admit, I’ve pondered how I’ll explain to my kids (convinced they’ll ask) why I never once saw Nirvana, the only band to emerge from the grunge era with its reputation intact (I had a ticket to a show, honest, but it was all the way down in Portland, Ore., and the weather was bad, and my car was iffy, and wasn’t there a death in the family or something?), yet I saw Pearl Jam half a dozen times. I’m still looking for a convincing excuse.

Turns out I may not need one. Against all odds, Pearl Jam has become respectable. Rolling Stone has hailed “Pearl Jam” (J Records), the band’s ninth studio release (self-titled albums are always reserved as comeback attempts), as its best work in a decade. There’s even anecdotal evidence it’s attracting a new generation of fans. “The good thing about being a young PJ fan,” a recent post on the band’s online Message Pit read, is that “we might get to live to see the 100th anniversary of Pearl Jam in 2091. I’ll be there, although I’ll be 98 years old.”

Part of the explanation for the band’s resurgence, if this is indeed what we’re witnessing, is that rock culture has circled back to the early 1990s. The retro rock movement began with 1960s garage rock, worked its way through post-punk, then pooped out at grunge’s doorstep. (The Vines was virtually a Nirvana cover band.) In the last couple of years, proto-grunge acts the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. have come back to bask in belated critical acclaim and headlining spots at summer festivals, and now there’s talk of the Smashing Pumpkins getting back together. If Pearl Jam hadn’t bothered to stay together all this time, the moment would be ripe for a reunion.

But it’s also that their music has gotten good again. Much of the new album will sound familiar to fans of my generation: the throbbing guitar solos and dank chord progressions, Vedder’s swallowed vibrato. There are even glimpses of the old Gen X anomie: “if nothing is everything, I will have it all,” Vedder sings in a new song called “Gone.”

But this isn’t the same band it was. There’s nothing on the new album as combustible as “Porch,” as primal as “Blood,” or as epically dirge-y as “Release.” When it reaches for this energy, especially on the first single, “World Wide Suicide,” it comes off sounding too polished and constrained, more like recent U2 or the Strokes than the gloriously overwrought Pearl Jam of yore.

The band is better when it doesn’t try to recapture its youth. The album hits its stride on “Marker in the Sand,” which alternates between driving seesaw guitars and sing-song choruses. “Parachutes” is a gossamer waltz that sounds a bit like Devendra Banhart covering a John Lennon love song, and “Come Back” is a lovely down-tempo blues. None of it is moshable.

The album is animated by disgust with the war in Iraq, although the message never really coheres.The closest it comes is a song called “Army Reserve” about a soldier’s wife and new mother who “can feel this war on her face.” “It’s becoming a lie she tells herself and everyone else / father’s risking his life for our freedoms,” sings Vedder. It reminds me a bit of Bob Dylan’s “John Brown” (not to be confused with the Civil War-era song of the same name), about a mother who proudly sends her son off to war, only to be terrified at the ravaged and defeated man who returns. Unlike Dylan’s song, there’s no resolution in “Army Reserve,” neither homecoming nor death.

The best protest song on the record isn’t even about the war. “Unemployable” tells the story of a working-class guy whose life is “sacrificed to a stranger’s bottom line.” On it, Pearl Jam shows it learned a thing or two from its co-headliners on the 2004 Vote for Change tour. The punctuated verses and soaring choruses sound remarkably like something Michael Stipe might have written, and the lyrics are vintage Bruce Springsteen: “Well his wife and kid’s asleep, but he’s still awake / on his brain weighs the curse of 30 bills unpaid / gets up lights a cigarette he’s grown to hate / thinking if he can’t sleep how will he ever dream again?”

In its best moments, “Pearl Jam” is worthy of such lofty comparisons. It goes a long way to redeeming the band and, perhaps more importantly, the long-suffering fans who love them.

Pearl Jam will perform in New York on May 5 at an as-yet-undisclosed location. For further information, contact Tower Records (692 Broadway, 212-505-1500).