A personal appreciation of my new favourite Nirvana album
Of
course, it’s not really a traditional studio album at all, in the strictest
understanding of the term. As a cobbled-together mop-up of b-sides, then-rarities,
covers and alt. versions, there’s little sense of a unified band entering the
studio to produce a cohesive sonic narrative. On the contrary however, its
ramshackle nature is its greatest asset.
Featuring
short bursts of fuzz-washed discordance such as Beeswax and Downer thrown in
amongst the angular growling of, say, Hairspray Queen, it’s certainly
the grungiest album the band would produce. Not the thick sludge of Bleach’s
no-frills metal, nor Nevermind’s polished sheen of chorus-laden,
fraternity-friendly rawk. Just pure, distilled grunge. Hell, throw in a couple
of tracks from genre contemporaries Mudhoney and you probably wouldn't notice
the difference.
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| Nirvana live: note original drummer Chad Channing |
Is
that a good thing? Depends if you like grunge really. Certainly a scene on
which many would pour scorn: the infectious spread of its lo-fi schtick amongst
every aspiring but uninspiring facsimile college band grew real tiresome real
quickly. But hell, show me a genre that hasn’t proliferated without turning
into a half-baked by-product of the original dish: punk, glam, metal, prog, etc
forever and ever Amen. As always, the pioneers produce the cream; the copycats
just curdle it.
There
was something about grunge that really grabbed me. I was an early 90’s slacker
teen with a healthy disrespect for convention and a cultural eye focussed
firmly towards the United States. When these dishevelled rock anti-heroes
shrugged their shoulders, threw on torn jeans and low-slung their
absurdly-distorted guitars, my peer group appeared ready-made for me. Grunge
didn’t play guitars, it beat them up.
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| Kurt, Krist, and Dave. Good job he wasn't called Kirk, eh? |
“You
want another Lithium? Have Scentless Apprentice and Milk It,” he chuckles grimly, giggling
and bellowing his way through a cochlea-shattering wall of spite. In fact, his
disdain for the genre crown he never wanted to wear runs explicitly throughout
that album: all bitchy liner notes and asides to the industry that made him. I
know what you’re thinking: “Oh, boo fucking hoo, sad millionaire rock star
can’t deal with success, idolisation and a kick-ass wife. Go cook up another
bag of smack to deal with it, yeah?” And you’re probably right, but I find the
art created as a result no less fascinating for it. Perhaps it’s an album best
enjoyed by roadside rubberneckers – “Roll up! Roll up! Come listen to the sound
of a band implode with self-loathing!”
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| Still rocking the grunge aesthetic half a lifetime later. The small child is related to me, somehow. |
So,
to happier times then, and back to Incesticide. It’s a remarkably optimistic
record: muddied and muddled it might be, but the scatter-gun scramble of tracks
reflects the band’s various incarnations and influences over their formative
years. A burst of bravura permeates the top-loaded selection of tunes: from
Sliver’s sunshine pop to the cheery choice of Vaselines and Devo covers,
there’s a notable lack of angst and weight that would later come to typify them
(although The Vaselines are a band to whom Nirvana would turn again, for their
distinctly funereal Unplugged session).
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| Why I never got to see Nirvana live... |
Elsewhere, grunge’s sharp-edged grunt drives the snappy blasts of two minute
post-punk, the soundtrack to a thousand YouTube vids of skaters snapping their
shinbones. The longer, more brooding menace of Aero Zeppelin and Big Long Now
then segue into the album’s climax, one of the band’s compositional career
highlights: Aneurysm. It’s big, small, loud, quiet, repetitive, deceptively
simple, and achingly satisfying. It quite rightly became a firm favourite of
their live set that sadly, I never got to experience.
Wrapped
up in Cobain’s own oblique artwork (defiantly free of the bold Bodoni typeface
logo – another poke in the eye to label Geffen), the album is less a statement,
more snapshots of intent. It’s a tangle of would-be paths the band never quite
took, a few choice moments capturing their various pivotal stages. Untapped
history and unexplored diversions, Incesticide is an illustrative musical trip
that hinted of a future that never quite was. That’s what’s so exciting about
this record – it’s a journey, not a destination. It’s the thrill of getting
ready to go out, rather than the slightly disappointing night out itself. It’s
the optimism of youth, rather than the world-weary cynicism of maturity. It’s
Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day.
Incesticide
is potential. And I love it so much it makes me sick.
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| My original copy, still with content-explanatory marketing sticker |
