The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Quite the accurate depiction of Nirvana in the flesh, for better or worse.
(This is an album that was previously covered on the Rediscovering! Click the link in the table to read a wordier and possibly less accurate version of my feelings on this album.)
With the suicide (ahem) of Kurt Cobain in 1994, the world lost one hell of a live act. When you have one of the most melodic screamers in all of rock on stage with one of the hardest hitting drummers in all of rock, you get a group worth seeing, and seeing as there'd be no more Nirvana without Kurt, his camp sought out to produce an album that captured the magic of their stage shows for hungry fans. Before this, Nirvana had appeared on a decent few transcription discs for radio stations, but the abandoned Verse Chorus Verse notwithstanding, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah was the first attempt in a now very long line of attempts to sell the live Nirvana experience to the public, and it's alright! It should've been better, and you've got better options now, but this isn't too shabby.
Wishkah leans on a handful of shows, crossfading between songs to give the illusion of them being from the same set, though inexplicably with all the stage banter excised. The 1991 Holland and Del Mar shows take up about half of the disc, and that was a good call, because these rip. Hearing the Del Mar version of "Teen Spirit" makes you actually like that song again! Even better is how heavily the "setlist" leans on damn fine deep cuts and non-album tracks like "Been a Son" and "Aneurysm". I question some of the chosen shows, though--given all the material DGC must've had to work with, "Sliver", "Breed", "Scentless Apprentice" and "Negative Creep" could've and should've had much less messy, atonal renditions featured. Wishkah is good for waking you up, but I'd say seek out Live at the Paramount instead if you're just getting into live Nirvana.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Drain You", "Aneurysm", "Lithium" | "Smells Like Teen Spirit" | "Sliver" |  |
| From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah's Rediscovering entry | |||
Going gently into that good night.
I actually expected to go into this review feeling like MTV Unplugged in New York was a tad overrated by time. This show is just so well-trodden, so common to still hear cuts from it on the radio or in playlists, I kinda wondered if the finish hadn't started to wear off. A cold November 18, 1993 saw the five-months-from-the-grave Nirvana play MTV Unplugged, as all the big musicians did then, but famously, Nirvana weren't interested in a rock show with acoustic guitars. Everything from their choice in setlist (devoid of hits save "Come As You Are" and "All Apologies") to choice of guest (the brothers Meat) pissed off MTV, but Nirvana was right, and MTV wound up airing Nirvana's Unplugged on repeat in the wake of Kurt's death, with a CD of the show dropping the next year.
Despite a few mistakes from Kurt (there were concerns in rehearsal he'd be able to play at all), Nirvana pulled together a surprisingly pretty setlist: the folksy, Vaselines-arranged "Jesus Doesn't Want Me For a Sunbeam" features Krist on accordion, and the electrically-enhanced cover of "The Man Who Sold the World" might as well be about Kurt himself. "Polly" starts the chills proper, with Lori Goldston's nasally cello casting a dark, sad edge over one of Nirvana's oldest tunes, while the Meat Puppets chunk lets the stage banter and audience requests blossom in surprisingly amusing fashion. Alternative's innocent era came to an end with Kurt's suicide, and MTV Unplugged in New York, right down to that howl on "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", is a wake for it, mournful and playful in equal amounts. No, I wouldn't call it overrated.
(I listened to my 5.1 downmix of the DVD for this one. The CD version seems artificially amped up with extra reverb and truncates a lot of the funniest moments of the show, like one of the Kirkwood brothers' reply to someone shouting for "Free Bird" and Kennedy's "Rape Me" request. It would've all fit on the CD just fine, DGC. Feel free to read that blog post for further details, and go with the DVD or Blu-ray, don't sell yourself short on Nirvana at their peak.)
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "The Man Who Sold the World", Polly", "Oh, Me" | "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" | Hmmmmmm |  |
| "Experimenting with 5.1 Downmixes" on mari's Scratchpad | |||
Violently funereal.
Even failing Kurt's suicide, there was nowhere else for the Nirvana sound to go after In Utero. It was the perfect storm--band, producer, studio. Nirvana were excellent performers, loud, aggressive, tight. Kurt was on a high with his songwriting. The songs were evocative, blood and bile oozing out of the accessible confines of the song structures, the lyrics about murderers stealing the essences of women, lobotomized actresses, Leonard Cohen, umbilical nooses. No one else could've brought out the raw violence of that material quite like the notorious Steve Albini, and the icy, isolated wilds of Minnesota were the ideal locale for recording, let's come straight out and say it, Nirvana's finest album. They would not have topped this. I am confident saying that.
What Nirvana lacked in the experimentation you'd expect from a developing band (no song on here really splits from verse-chorus-verse, as Kurt famously put it), they made up for in the creepy, agonized screech that In Utero regularly presents. Guitar solos take the form of piercing feedback. The natural room reverb hugging Kurt's throat-scorched hollers paints a vivid scene, like the man is being tortured in front of you. Dave Grohl's boomy drumming is as rock-steady as it is savage on cuts like "Scentless Apprentice", and Krist Novoselic keeps it in the pocket, coolly completing Nirvana's rhythm section. Never ceasing (in fact, only ramping up in intensity towards the end), it's "All Apologies"' coda, flatlining into feedback and hushed moans, that shows the tormented beast's final twitches.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Serve the Servants", "Dumb", "Milk It" | "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" | -- | |
A little something for everyone, even the freaks.
One day, shortly after the band called Nirvana became The Band Called Nirvana, their former label Sub Pop calls up their new label DGC with an offer. "We have lots of unreleased Nirvana recordings, and we'll sell 'em to you for lots of money for you to make lots of money if you agree to release them." (Kurt agreed because he got full control over the artwork.) In some ways a stopgap between albums and in others a way to fight bootlegging, you'd expect a crassly commercial release like Incesticide to be gross, but it isn't--well, "Mexican Seafood" is--actually, it's quite good. This is Nirvana at both their poppiest and their most offputtingly experimental, capturing their essence in ways their proper albums couldn't.
Material stretching from their earliest studio sessions for Bleach to then-recent BBC sessions are featured here, presented in not really chronological order. Between the searingly repetitive twee-rock of "Sliver", two lovely sugary Vaselines covers and an even better Devo one for good measure, and an alternate version of the indie pop gem "Been a Son" from Blew, the first half of Incesticide really lays the catchy stuff on thick. The caustically sludgy Bleach outtakes in the back half is where folks might get lost, as Kurt tests the limits of his vocal range on "Hairspray Queen" or simply nauseates with his lyrical fixations on "Mexican Seafood". Uneven by design, the fact that this hits so often is proof there was nevertheless method to Nirvana's madness.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Dive", "Turnaround", "Big Long Now" | "Aneurysm" | "Beeswax" |  |
What a delightful little pop rock album!
It's pretty good!
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Lithium", "Lounge Act", "Drain You" | "In Bloom" | I much prefer the demo of "Stay Away", but that's pushing it |  |
Sludge monkeys.
In 1988, a janitor and his weird tall bassist friend borrowed $600 and two drummers to record an album. The world was given Bleach the following year. It's always a little tricky with these baby photo records to divorce yourself of the crushing, crashing, atom-smashing force that Nirvana would become in its wake, but do your best. Bleach is a bleakly primordial hard rock album that features a deceptively dextrous guitarist (seriously, you try to sing and play "Mr. Moustache"'s main riff up to speed) with a caustic wail and an interest in pulling pop tunes out of its murky depths. Only a few underwritten mid-album cuts and some issues with its rhythm section keep Bleach from capturing Nirvana's full destructive capabilities.
Kurt's guitar abilities often get pegged as sloppy, but there's plenty of surprisingly inventive, even shreddy moments to make Bleach the guitar nerd's favorite Nirvana record. It's the mixture of "About a Girl"'s cute pop, "Negative Creep"'s shrieking rampages, and "Paper Cuts"' chilling depiction of child abuse that makes this record so uniquely crushing. Unfortunately, without Dave Grohl in the picture, Chad Channing provides most of the drums here; while not a bad drummer, Chad's a light hitter, and his beats and fills often lag the charge of the rest of the band, undermining the intensity. (The Melvins' Dale Crover is an understandably much tighter fit, though he's sadly only featured on four tracks.) Nirvana would go on to make better records, but they would never sound quite this leaden again.
(The original vinyl version of the album ends at "Sifting"; later CD issues would append "Big Cheese" and "Downer" to the tracklist. I consider these canon to the running order, for one thing because "Sifting" is only sort of a closer, but also because I just plain like "Big Cheese". Dem volume swells.)
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Blew", "About a Girl", "Big Cheese" | "School" | "Scoff" | |
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