Nirvana
In Utero

I admit that when Shiva suggested I review this CD, I was a bit taken aback: you should know that I subscribe to Franco P.'s school of thought, which instilled in me over three years that anyone who doesn't make music at the level of Pat Metheny or Steve Vai is garbage, especially if that anyone responds to the name Nirvana...
Well, in this year of didactic inactivity, I've learned that it's not really like that, and good music can come from anywhere in the world, including Seattle! However, this doesn't mean that I didn't have difficulty reaching this conclusion: this week, I did a “full immersion” into the world of the KC band, and I hope to live up to expectations.

I've made so many considerations that I'm sure I'll forget to report them all, but I decided to rely on Shiva’s words to introduce the album and all my opinions about it. He mainly told me three useful things for reflection:

1.“…it always goes unnoticed because of "Nevermind", but still, I find it the best album by Nirvana…”: the first statement is true (when I hear the name “Nirvana,” the first thing I think of is the swimming baby…), and the second, in my opinion, is just as true: I downloaded “Nevermind” to make a comparison and must say that, excluding the successful singles, it’s less pleasant, and it’s difficult to reach the end. I assumed that the cause of this was MTV's promotion and commercialization campaign, which resulted in losing the values and goals that Cobain and company had set. On the contrary, “In Utero” seems almost a sign of protest by the band against record labels: it sells half the copies of the previous one, adopts different sounds but, in doing so, perhaps shows their true musical and personal side.
2. “…you can hear pain, despair, and the desire to be happy (despite the crap surrounding him) in Kurt's screams…”: I agree with this too; there are some songs that are pure screams and noise! The crap mentioned I identified with some personal events of KC: first, the opposition of producers to his music (from a special on All Music, I learned that, if I remember correctly, the guys were called back into the recording studio to “soften” the sounds that would otherwise be unlistenable for the average consumer the work was intended for. Imagine how angry they must have been for this!), then his family problems between the wife who didn’t love him (from documents, it seems he loved her so much, but she seemed to want to divorce him…I don't know) and the daughter he adored, like any father could for a daughter (in summary: could he have been disappointed by the Hollywood-style aspect of the events?), lastly, the dependency on drugs, medications, and all the junk that can exist… however, I am not the right person to talk about Kurt's human side, I'm certainly not an expert, so I’ll stop here. Pain, despair, and the desire to be happy are the main themes of the entire CD: I could take dozens and dozens of examples, but I'll limit myself to a few: “…go away, go far away, go far away…”, or “…rape me […], hate me, do it and do it again…”, or still “…I am not like them […], I think I’m dull or maybe just happy…” or even “…what's wrong with me?...” or lastly “…mayday every day in my heart…”. There's more, this is a selection, and re-reading it, to tell the truth, it hardly conveys any of what it really is: only by listening to the album, only by hearing the screams or the ironic calm or the melancholy of the singing, do you understand the meaning of these verses. But I assure you it is exciting.
3.“…they didn’t have the technique of Dream Theater or other great bands, but personally, I think technique matters little if you can express feelings like those, change the face of music, and involve an entire generation…”: nothing to counter, except that I think the peak is expressing those things even with technique (see, indeed, DT: they are accused of coldness – and in fact, at the concert I attended there were only the drummer and the keyboardist who were “getting pumped”, the others standing still playing… - but I defend them by inviting you to investigate their discography a bit more and listen to songs like “Hollow Years”, “The Spirit Carries On”, “Stream of Consciousness”…). For the rest, I have a criticism for Shiva: it's true they moved people, it's true they set the characteristics of grunge (and not only that, in my opinion…), but how many of their die-hard fans, those who claim to have followed them forever, are instead followers of a trend born only after KC's death? Obviously, I’m not talking about you, but about those who were a certain age in 1994…

Perhaps I went on a bit too long… I'll summarize everything I have to say about the album, integrating it with the things I forgot to write: we are faced with the best of Nirvana’s works, with much more “noise” sounds than “Nevermind” (maybe they wanted to regain some credibility in alternative circles…) and much less commercial goals than those, unwittingly, of the same; we are faced with the best Kurt Cobain, more mature melodically and psychologically, uncomfortable with becoming an MTV icon and ironic in the lyrics when it comes to denouncing this or that problem; above all, we are faced with a message that is not what the teenage girls wearing the group’s t-shirts have “perceived” and who seem to be adulating a new god (always the talk of trends… how I can’t stand people like that, who think they’ve understood everything about life, who behave as if they were the fourth element of the band, and who then the next day renounce everything and run after Jim Morrison or, in the worst case, Eminem!), but something much deeper, intimate, which I doubt will ever be fully understood. I repeat, I don’t want to presume to preach about things I’m very little informed about, but from reading the lyrics, I have drawn these conclusions.
About the songs, each one seems to have its own specific role: in almost all, I have found a biographical vein of Kurt, the undisputed leader of the band (indeed, it can be said that Nirvana lived by his function: he died, everything died…), elevating (…) the work to a masterful introspection, a masterpiece of grunge.
Musically, it's the same: distortions and screams for the most excruciating anger, arpeggios or acoustic strumming for gloominess or resignation, background yet elegant bass lines for melodic embellishments, drums at times truly involving. Thematically, they are very varied (the main focus is Cobain's life, yes, but it has a thousand facets!): from relationships with wife Courtney to those with his parents (“…I just want you to know that / I don’t hate you anymore…” , just to clarify the atmosphere), from criticism of society with its lifestyle models (“Very Ape”) to criticism of the record company (“Pennyroyal Tea”), from his problem with drugs to his new, unwanted image. And more. But that's enough.

One last note can actually be made: their compositional limitation is visible, it's true that grunge isn't very demanding on its own, and that still does not impede the enjoyment of listening, but among the songs there are many signs (“Rape Me” which plagiarizes “Smell Like Teen Spirit”, “Pennyroyal Tea” which really seems sloppily made, “Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip” – for which listening you also have to wait 20 minutes as it's the ghost track – which drags on needlessly and fruitlessly) indicating that KC’s physical death probably preceded his artistic death by a little. I hope I'm not wrong.
I have nothing more to add (surely once published, I'll recall something but it won't matter…), I thank Shiva for giving me the opportunity to study an album I knew little about and I promise to speak a bit less poorly of Nirvana than I used to… I won’t become a fan of theirs, that's for sure, but it’s always nice to expand one’s musical culture!
I recommend it to those who want to know more about Kurt Cobain (as already said, in fact, besides being a CD, it’s also an autobiographical book), to those who claim to be admirers of the band even without owning it (so maybe Nirvana will not only appeal to you for fashion reasons…) and simply to those who have the desire to listen to it.

The most beautiful song without a doubt is “Tourette’s”: it's the name of a known disease, in fact, called “Tourette's syndrome,” characterized by a sudden inability to control words and movements… and that's what Kurt does here, scream, yell words that are not even understandable (on the Internet, there are, in fact, two different lyrics, depending on interpretations, because no one has the faintest idea of what he’s saying!) with instruments going crazy and a chorus that could be worthy of a metal song…
The least beautiful song is “Pennyroyal Tea,” because it's a kind of rock that you wouldn’t expect from them as they simply don’t know how to do it. Expressionless complaint, lack of engagement, banality… failed.

Ps.: it's the first time I write for Debaser, I have fun reviewing for a site created and frequented by my group of friends. I wrote this review some time ago and didn’t intend to send it here, so the people I talk about (Shiva, Franco P.) are people I know and are contextualized with respect to my “audience”...