Nirvana – Incesticide: A Tribute

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.

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.

Kurt, Krist, and Dave. Good job he wasn't called Kirk, eh?

For years In Utero was my favourite Nirvana LP. Maybe it still is, artistically-speaking. A startling combination of fragility and balls-out bombast, it encapsulates perfectly Cobain’s wonderful, poetic rejection of rock stardom.

“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!”

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).

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.

My original copy, still with content-explanatory marketing sticker