As record companies desperately try to reverse their sagging fortunes there is a whiff of irony about Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ being drafted into service, across a range of different (and often expensive) formats, given that band’s famously anti-corporate stance and yet here it is again – that damn baby chasing the dollar bill through the pool and it will undoubtedly sell by the truckload. The question, really, is should it? Is this re-issue worth the hassle and if so, who does it appeal to? Read on.
Nirvana were not the best band to tread the boards in 1991, hell they weren’t even the best band in Seattle, and yet their rise was meteoric. Whilst contemporary acts such as Mudhoney were left trailing in their wake (finiancially at least) and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains scrambled to distance themselves from the dreaded ‘g’ word almost as soon as it was first uttered, Nirvana surfed a wave in that year and for a brief period they were untouchable. It is a long time since I sat down and listened to ‘Nevermind’ all the way through. Rewind to 1993 and I was a grunge devotee. I collected it all; the ultra-rare ‘teriyaki asthma’ compilation (complete with ‘mexican seafood’), the original digi-pack edition of ‘lithium’ (the one with ‘D-7’) and even a rare original vinyl print of ‘Bleach’, the album that later had to be reissued with a sticker stating ‘Nirvana’s debut album’ because so few people actually went out and bought it. I had grown up listening to Queen, then Guns ‘n’ Roses and Maiden, but Nirvana were the first band that really grabbed me as being mine, a feeling that many fans will recognise, even after all these years, and whilst Nirvana may not have been the most musical of their peers, they captured a certain vibe during their brief existence which rang a chord with millions of disaffected youths across the globe. That vibe, that passion, was what drew fans to Nirvana like moths to a flame and even if ‘Nevermind’ is their weakest album, sitting and listening to it once again took me back to the first time I heard it and conjured those very same feelings that I thought lost when it came to my once-favourite band.
I recount this because my experience is far from unique. Talking to friends and colleagues now, it is easy to see that we were all hooked on Nirvana, and Kurt in particular, because, for all his flaws, he walked it like he talked it. His guitar wailed and howled with all the pent up aggression and angst he tried so hard to project out from his wounded core and his voice, roughened and worn by the abuses of cigarettes, drugs, liquor and screaming, was still somehow beautiful and haunted even in full flight. Of course, fans of the band will know all this and own a copy of ‘Nevermind’ already so is a re-issue strictly necessary? Well… Yes, actually. The first disc is the lesser of the two. A re-mastered version of the album, the forums are already flooded with a debate about its benefits. Listening through, there are differences, some of which at least are for the better. Most noticeable are the boosted guitars on ‘lounge act’ which tear holes through the clean passages, the wider stereo field on both ‘breed’ and ‘territorial pissings’ allowing you to appreciate just how savage Kurt’s thrashing is and a subtle boosting of the random atmospherics which comprise the build up of ‘drain you’, allowing you to hear with much more depth and clarity what was going on in there. Moreover the new master feels a lot less compressed, particularly when played back to back with the original although complaints about the unnecessary raising of the volume are valid. Where disc 1 falls down, however, is the unnecessary re-mastering of the b-sides, particularly ‘Aneurysm’ and ‘curmudgeon’, two rough as f*** songs that show evidence of digital sound enhancement on the guitars that is as undesirable as it is unnecessary. Moreover by adding all the b sides to the end of the disc the joy of being woken from your slumber after twenty minutes of silence by ‘Endless Nameless’ is gone forever (it now waits a paltry thirty seconds to make its appearance). The debate may well rage on about adding extra tracks to albums, but for my money they should keep the extras to extra discs, not tacked on the end in such an irreverent fashion.
Where this reissue piques the interest most successfully is on disc 2, however. For years I had heard and read of the Smart studio sessions, and even owned bits of them on various ‘outcesticide’ compilations, but here, for the first time, you can listen to primal demo versions of classic Nirvana tracks complete with the band’s ‘Bleach’-era drummer (the much maligned Chad Channing). The songs are not too different in terms of structure, but there is a naked aggression that is absent from the final, Andy Wallace polished mix, that allies several of the tracks far closer to ‘Bleach’ or ‘In utero’ than their parent album. Witness the cathartic ‘lithium’ with its howled chorus, for example, or the savage renditions of ‘in bloom’ and ‘immodium’ (the track that was to become ‘breed’) to see how ‘Nevermind’ might have sounded in different hands. Of even more interest are the tracks that didn’t make the album – ‘dive’ which ended up on ‘incesticide’ and ‘sappy’ which was never officially released despite being recorded several times over the years. Finally there’s a sloppy but serviceable cover of ‘here she comes now’ (Velvet Underground) which will be familiar to bootleg hunters the world over but which, again, never made it to a b side, being dropped in favour of live tracks.
For the more adventurous there are also ‘the boombox rehearsals’ which admittedly offer some curiosity value but which it is hard to imagine wanting to play often given their intrinsically rough ‘n’ ready nature. Fanatics will certainly enjoy the warts ‘n’ all ‘smells like teen spirit’ recorded as the band thrashed it out, while two gems in particular do stand out – the unreleased ‘verse chorus verse’ which sadly never made it to the album; and ‘old age’ which some may remember from Hole’s ‘my body the hand grenade’ rarities album, but overall the raw and broken quality of a tape recording impedes the desire for regular listening. A couple of previously unreleased BBC sessions (‘drain you’ and an awesome ‘something in the way’) round things out and it’s hard to argue the generosity with which the package has been put together.
Overall I have to admit to having been reluctant to revisit territory I love so well, but the powers that be have actually put in a decent amount of effort; and while the debate will no doubt continue about the cynical nature of these ‘deluxe’ reissues, there is no doubting that fans of the band will be thrilled to hear the various extras that make up the package. There are, of course, other versions available: an ultra-deluxe package offers the 2 discs above as well as a third disc of pre-Andy Wallace mixes (‘the Devonshire mixes’) and a DVD of the legendary ‘live at Paramount’ concert (although happily this is available separately) along with all sorts of other gubbins, while a quadruple vinyl set offers the complete audio but no DVD. All in all you pays your money, you takes your choice, but for what it’s worth the double disc offers plenty for fans to get their teeth into and offers a fine chance to revisit an album you may well have taken a lengthy break from. A well thought out and undeniably enjoyable trip back to the nineties.
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