Nirvana
Bleach
The Band: Kurt Cobain- Guitar, vocals
Krist Novoselic- Bass
Chad Channing
The 90’s were a big decade for Grunge. It saw the birth of many great grunge bands and other that started in the late 80’s really take off. Bands like
Mudhoney,
Soundgarden,
Alice In Chains among others. However, in the midst of all these bands, on seemed to rein Supreme.
Nirvana were unquestionably the most popular grunge band of the 90’s. While in my opinion they weren’t the best they were certainly the most influential and still pretty darn good to boot. So, how were Nirvana formed? Nirvana was born in 1987 in the dense grunge scene of Seattle. Formed by Kurt Cobain (guitar/vocals) and Krist Novoselic (bass) the band went through a lot of drummers in the early going. The band did however, manage to hold Chad Channing down long enough to record an album.
Bleach was released in 1989 on a budget of merely eight hundred dollars. In 1991 Nirvana finally settled on a permanent drummer.
David Grohl (front man of Foo Fighters) was their choice. In 1991 they released
Nevermind. The album was an instant success and sold millions upon millions of copies. Nirvana would continue on their success releasing two more albums before the unfortunate and untimely death of Kurt Cobain. He was to believed to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In spite of this, some believe it was a murder. There are many theories as to why it couldn’t have been a suicide. One of which being that Kurt Had mass amounts of heroine in his blood, so at that time he would’ve been incapable of firing a gun. Anyways, that’s really not what I’m here to talk about, so let’s move on.
Lyrical Messages
Nirvana are well known for their moderately depressing lyrical messages. This album is no exception. I must admit I did have trouble finding a concrete message in each track, as the lyrics don’t always make sense there is an undeniable disheartening feel to them. Some songs lyrics even disturbed me some. Some of you out there may not be aware of this because it’s hard to understand Cobain’s voice when he sings, but Nirvana have some sickening lyrics. I’ll give you a small example. This is taken from the song
Floyd The Barber
Barney ties me to the chair
I can't see, I'm really scared
Floyd breathes hard, I hear a zip
Pee-Pee pressed against my lips
I sense others in the room
Opey Aunt Bee, I presume
They take turns in cut me up
I died smothered in Andy's butt
See what I meant by disturbing? I’m not really sure if there is any message in that song. As far as I can tell it’s just about a man who was molested by his barber. Perhaps Kurt was trying to express that there are a lot of bad people in the world and that it’s not such a nice place after all. It might have had something to do with expressing that the world isn’t the nice safe place that the government likes you to believe it is, or that big criminals don’t just live in Los Angeles they can be people in small towns, like barbers. I can’t really be sure, though. I don’t have the same mind set as Mr. Cobain, so I’m pretty much just guessing here. Now, don’t think that all the tracks on this album are like that one. There are some tracks with lighter, while still depressing messages. A lot of tracks seem to be about sex/girls/past relationships and things along those lines. Take for example a quote from
Negative Creep, “Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more”. Another from
Scoff, “In your room, I’m not older, in your eyes, I’m not worth it”. Those are just two of many examples of similar lyrics in this album. Based on that I would think that Kurt poured a lot of emotion into this album and that he used as sort of a chance to get things off his chest. I’ve heard artists say before that they like to sing about things that make them angry or sad, so that once they pour it all out into the track it leaves them feeling cleansed. I think that may have been what Kurt did here.
Sound Quality
To be frank this album’s sound quality is poor. This is understandable considering its entire budget was eight hundred dollars, but the fact that it was produced with little money doesn’t make the poor sound quality any more tolerable. The poor production actually gave the album a more gloomy feel, which actually suites Nirvana’s style. Unfortunately it still bugged me and it will effect the rating. At times it was actually difficult to hear Kurt’s vocals over the guitar. Take for example the first verse
Blew. The guitar made it to difficult to hear the vocals. For about the first to seconds a actually thought the vocals were a second guitar playing. I found this aspect quite annoying, as it’s hard enough to understand Kurt’s vocals without instruments getting in the way. It was also evident that at this point in Nirvana’s career they didn’t have the greatest equipment, as the instrumentals sound was not great. There was too much gain. At times notes seemed to run together and it was hard to tell them apart. This made the album lack ‘crispness’ and made it seem to run together after a while. Once again it’s hard to blame this on the band as they didn’t have much cash., but that doesn’t make it any easier to listen to the album. Not that it’s difficult to listen to this. It’s still good, just not something I can listen to too often.
Instrumentals
This albums instrumentals are slightly above average. Keep in mind I’m rating them on a professional scale and Kurt Cobain only took one guitar lesson, ever and he didn’t pay for it. He also couldn’t read music. So, we’re not dealing with a professional musician here. The majority of the guitar work was fairly well written. I’m not sure if Kurt detunes his guitar or if it was just the tone on his amp, but it has sort of unique sound to it. It seems lower than it should be, but that could just be me. I found some of the instrumentals to be a bit simplistic compared to other popular grunge bands at the time, but based on Cobain’s musical background this is understandable. There were actually a couple solos scatted about the album. The best one was most likely the solo in
Blew. Considering the fact that Kurt probably didn’t know any scales it was very well written. A lot of the guitar work was actually kind of catchy. I’ve noticed that a lot in Nirvana’s music. It’s more simplistic and catchy than most other grunge bands. It’s like it has a hint of pop-punk in there. The bass, like the guitar was adequate. Unlike most bands it was actually rather involved with the album. As is in most bands with only one guitarist. Due to the fact that there’s only one guitar to look after it gives more room for the bass to do its thing and do its thing it does. The very first track has a bass intro actually. It’s difficult to tell the notes apart and like the guitar it seems to be detuned, but it’s pretty good none the less. I actually enjoyed the bass’s tone. While it was a little hard to tell the notes apart, if you ignore that it was great. The extremely low tone helped to give this album its gloomy atmosphere. I also noticed that Krist kept excellent rhythm throughout. There were a few errors scattered about, but considering the low budget the probably only played each song once. There’s not a whole lot to say about the drums. Grohl kept excellent timing and didn’t rely to much on simple beats, which I liked. His fills and roll beats were skillful. He wasn’t up there with Neil Peart or anything, but he was good. That’s pretty much the whole album really. Not bad, not great, but good.
Pros: Fairly good instrumentals
Catchy at times
Cons: Production
Sound quality
Vocals
Overall Rating:
3/5
Metallicaman
