Nirvana
Unplugged In New York

THE REVIEW

The lights, the stage, the screams... then nothing.

Just a pale figure, emotionless, enveloped in a thin layer of smoke, picks up his bones and takes them to the chair. He doesn't look, doesn't hear, doesn't speak, doesn't even turn around to look at what's around him, nothing. Exhaustion and withdrawal are evident.

He picks up his guitar, barely whispers something, indicates, just to show he's not dead, and then returns to his previous state. Suddenly the music starts and changes are noticeable: the use of acoustic guitars only in place of electric ones, quite unusual for a rock band (to be precise, Grunge), but even so, the songs lose nothing; in fact, they take on a new coating that highlights the trembling and insecure voice of Kurt and the suffering that through it and his music he wants to convey.

The voice comes out in bursts, and the singer transforms: he always remains there seated, hunched over that chair, but with the voice, he becomes a stage beast. Notes follow one after the other, yet with a certain calm. His throat is on fire. The anger inside him spills out like vomit that mingles with those four chord progressions. Everything seems apparently calm, but within that calm are words that find no peace, disguised cries for help. When he sings, there's no one in front of him, just his guitar and the smoke of a cigarette that envelops him, the nicotine slowly settling on the instrument's strings. Finished the concert, he withdraws without uttering a word to anyone and closes into himself again. The review ends here. "What?", you might say, "you haven't even talked about the songs, you haven't described practically anything."

I preferred to talk about the sensations and the atmosphere that this record created for me, also because there were already two other reviews of the same album, it wouldn't have made sense. I didn't want to give personal judgments, I preferred to stay out, avoiding words like: "I think", "I believe" and so on, perhaps for convenience. I wanted to convey a different message of an album that should be listened to without reflecting, without thinking about what it is. You just need to let yourself go without too many distractions.

The lights, the stage, the screams... then nothing.