Review Summary: Montage of Heck only serves to show that it wasn't just Cobain guiding Nirvana. Maybe it was Nirvana guiding him.
Kurt Cobain’s suicide is something of a martyr legend in the realm of music. The Nirvana frontman was the artsy outsider from Aberdeen, WA that managed to create one of the biggest rock bands of its time, and while the trio stood alongside Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden as a pillar of grunge, Cobain never fit in with those bands. Whether it was his tortured artistic vision or simply his borderline egotistic expectations for rock, Cobain earned himself a bit of distance even in the tightly knit Seattle rock scene. He was an artist, and with that artistry, came a rampant desire to reject the culture that surrounded him. Why does this mean anything? Because Kurt Cobain’s recently discovered home recordings, compiled into the
Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings album, perfectly illustrates the musician’s frantic psyche. Cobain had a lot of ideas, some so rampantly around-the-bend that it took this long to finally compile them into something marketable, but this is a collection of borderline unintelligible ramblings that only serve to show the most unlikably pretentious side of this grunge icon.
Cobain’s idea of melody and classic rock inspiration pioneered much of the creative vision that was heard in Nirvana. As a fan of David Bowie, R.E.M. and Neil Young, Cobain was clearly the basket case of the basket cases, the real loner of the already unusual grunge scene. He was that bizarre creative type, not unlike a Lou Reed or John Lennon. It’s to be expected that his home recordings are where he can be completely free from templates, with neither a band nor a producer to hold his artistry back.
Montage of Heck is what happens when Cobain is no longer locked down and can be as weird and experimental as he pleases. In that regard, he achieves his goal. It’s difficult for me to process what Cobain was thinking when recording these tracks, because they range from the dreamy and dull to the bottom-of-the-barrel rotten leftovers. As artsy as Cobain aimed to be,
Montage of Heck makes him sound unappealing, scatterbrained, and downright pretentious.
For the demos of earlier tracks, they’re simply the tracks with sloppier performance and poorer sound quality. Early versions of songs like “Sappy” and “Been a Son” are okay, but pale in comparison to the superior studio versions. There’s no endearing roughness or artistic swagger to these demos: they’re just inferior. They just sound
bad. These demos aren’t even of the better songs Cobain composed for Nirvana. Aside from a glimmer in “Sappy”, they’re just poorer renditions of middle-of-the-road Nirvana tracks. It all ends with a 10-minute “Do Re Mi” track, which slurs into a dizzy barely halfway through, before hanging upon itself till the end. Periodically, you can hear some of the style of Nirvana peeking through the fuzzy static and squeaking acoustic strings, but putting them in the same breath as their cleaner studio versions does more to sully Nirvana’s grander moments that offer an intimate perspective on their development.
For all the other tracks, this is slop. Between squeaking commercials, wailing about beans, and a disturbing story about a fat adolescent driving himself to attempt suicide, Cobain’s artistic visions are just too out-there to create anything cohesive or even close to enjoyable. The basic package sticks more to actual demos, but they’re just unintelligible and rough, unclean and unrefined remnants of Cobain’s songwriting. If you’re gutsy enough to try the deluxe version, you’ll hear almost 40 extra minutes of random rambling and grunting, straight from the depths of Cobain’s tortured subconscious. The problem is that none of this sounds remotely interesting or pleasing. This is Cobain at his most primal and disturbed, but it’s clear that while Cobain was indeed the brainchild toward Nirvana’s strongest moments, he simply is not at his best without at least a little studio discipline.
Montage of Heck is simply picking up whatever bits are left of Cobain’s legacy, packaged and sealed as a cash-in, but I can’t even say I’m comfortable saying it’s just that. Saying that is implying that this is the record label’s fault that this feels so drained and dead. But there isn’t anything guiding this album. The total lack of discipline in these recordings is mind-blowing, because it’s really Kurt Cobain being as free from corporate influence as possible. With this total chaos, there’s no studio to refine the edges, no way to tighten the terribly loose bolts in these ideas. Cobain, without any discipline from producers or band members, is an artist from another world without any real message to convey. Sure, he was, in a way, a martyr for the Generation X he helped build. Good for him, but rambling with fart noises and squealing yodels isn’t some artistic vision come alive.
Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings doesn’t show Cobain in a good light. It doesn’t show him as the amazing musician he’s known for and only serves to show that, no, it wasn’t just him guiding Nirvana. Maybe it was Nirvana guiding
him.
