As you can see, though, I still give this album a pretty high grade, which means there's plenty that I like and respect about it. Even if Cobain wasn't bothering to stick strong riffs or strong hooks into all of his songs, this shouldn't be taken as evidence that he somehow couldn't have stuck strong riffs or strong hooks into his songs, because the balance of the album is chock full of them. The opening "Blew" might initially be a little laid-back in its sludginess in the verses, but the chorus riff, with Cobain mirroring it with his vocal melody, is absolutely pummelling, and the song takes off after its first iteration. "Floyd the Barber," a disturbing tale of S&M and murder in the world of The Andy Griffith Show, would be nice if it only contained that three-beat bit leading into the "I was shaaaaaaamed" chorus, but the combination of that with the lyrics and all of the other interesting bits in the song make it an early classic. And then it's off to the world of pop balladry, of sorts, in "About a Girl," with multiple rough Kurt voices more-or-less harmonizing with each other over a jangly-ish guitar part in the verses before getting more predictably heavy as the song goes on. It would sound better on Unplugged, of course, but this is a great rendition as well.

Of the remaining tracks, the clear standout is "Negative Creep," which is essentially thrash-metal without the necessary technical perfection, and where the lyrics hit a minimalist raw nerve more forcefully than anywhere else on the album. The 20 times that "Daddy's little girl ain't a girl no more" gets repeated might be over-the-top, but this is a case where repetition really adds to the effect, whereas the repetition of "Sifting" undermined it. The other songs, aside from the hilariously energetic cover of "Love Buzz" (which was their debut single, oddly enough), all merge killer riffs, an awesome guitar sound and delightfully sloppy guitar solos with a nagging sense of depressed paranoia. "School" is about finding yourself in high school again, without recess to relieve the boredom; "Scoff" is about realizing that somebody you care about doesn't think you're worth the bother, and wanting to drown your sorrows in booze; "Swap Meet" is about a couple that works together for a living but doesn't share themselves fully with the other; "Mr. Moustache" is (I think, but I'm honestly guessing) about getting lectured by somebody whose insight you don't really care about.

The whole album has this sense of the world not being quite what it's cracked up to be, and the reaction to this sense that occupies the album is a combination of being angry with the world for being so awful and a good dose of self-loathing for not being able to appreciate it anyway. No, I don't entirely empathize with this perspective the way somebody in their early 20s in the late 80s and 90s would have, but that doesn't mean that I don't empathize at all, and the album definitely does prompt me to think of pains from long past. Rooting out old teenage pains isn't especially my ideal for a listening experience, of course, but the presentation of these emotions in such a (mostly) tuneful and entertaining way makes the album plenty worth it. Maybe the album is primitive, and maybe it's derivative, and maybe it didn't signify on its own that Nirvana was going to matter on a large scale, but I can't imagine somebody who loved Nevermind not liking this quite a bit. I'm glad they grew into something beyond this, though.

There's somewhat of a dip in the middle of the album concerning immediate enjoyability of the material, but the album manages to start and end on extended high notes, which always helps with the overall impression of an album. Two of the songs, both great, are based around acoustic guitars; "Polly" (which originated from sessions when the band still had Chad Channing on drums) has lyrics of dubious moral integrity (continuing a pattern from all of the band's albums, Cobain includes a number that, to some degree or another, is about rape), and the closing "Something in the Way" is a quiet contemplation of the sort that one could expect from somebody sitting in a quiet room while stoned (or living under an overpass in this case). The combination of the starting and ending stretches also produces at least five (possibly six, depending on my feelings on "Lithium," which is quite good but probably could have used something in place of the the endless "Yeah, yeah, yeah" placeholder in the anthemic chorus part) top-notch bits of heavy poppy guitar rock. My personal preference for the top two would be "In Bloom," where Kurt rips on humanity as embodied by his fans in the context of some great riffs, and "Come As You Are," which bases itself off a magnificent phased guitar part with a great tone (I originally thought it was a bassline with a great tone, and I was corrected), but it's only by the slightest bit that I prefer those to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (maybe it's essentially a rewrite of Boston's "More Than a Feeling," but it's the best rewrite of "More Than a Feeling" that could exist), "Breed" (which never lets up from its awesome thrashy introduction) and "On a Plain" (lots of small interesting ideas glued together into something greater). True, I can very easily hear in these songs the seeds of so many bad influences and so many lesser songs from lesser bands that bore me whenever I hear them, but I can ignore that pretty easily when I'm listening to them.

The other four tracks, tucked in the middle, are a clear step down, but I still basically like all of them. "Territorial Pissings" is most infamous for Krist's hilarious introductory delivery of the chorus of The Youngblood's "Get Together," but it quickly turns into an energetic blast (with frantic drumming) that sounds a little like a knockoff of "Breed" but only a little bit. "Drain You" never quite lives up to the fun start of "One baby to another says I'm lucky to have met you," but the weird noisy midsection is pretty interesting, especially on an album that doesn't have lot in the way of curious idiosyncracy. "Lounge Act" is a little more background-ish than I'd prefer, but still interesting, and "Stay Away" would be worth it if only for the great repeated "Alright!" over that up-and-down guitar sound. Also, the "God is gay!" at the end of "Stay Away" is so immature that it makes me giggle.

There is a lot more that another reviewer would probably say about this album, of course, but that would mostly take the form of talking about the lyrics or about whatever emotional impact this album had on the reviewer at a specific point in my life. Well, I heard this album much too late for it to have a significant impact on my life, so that's not really applicable. I also don't care a tremendous amount about the lyrics for this album, but that's largely because Cobain didn't really care that much about them either; he often finalized them a very short time before recording his singing, and he thought that the scrutiny that so many people put on his lyrics was pretty ridiculous. I will say that, while I don't really care about what Cobain is singing, I do often find myself moved by how he sings; in terms of disconnect between quality of delivery and substance of what is being delivered, Cobain is rather Stipe-ish on this album, and I'm not sure that's an accident.

In any case, this is ultimately a pretty great album, and while I didn't get into it at the "right" time, I'm glad I got into it. If you've somehow never heard this album, and if you haven't locked yourself into a rigid mindset of "I don't want to listen to anything from the 90s" (which seems kinda ridiculous as the 90s fades further into the past), please give it a serious shot. Maybe you'll learn to love it, maybe you won't be able to get beyond the surface problems, but at the least it's an album where not having an informed opinion about it is a little inexcusable for anybody who considers themselves a lover of rock and pop music.

Unfortunately, this album confirms to me that, as much as I like the band, I can never become one of those fans. Five of the tracks come from the band's first demo tape, and apart from some mild enjoyment of "Aero Zeppelin" I just can't get myself to like them. I knew "Downer" from the Bleach bonus tracks, and I disliked it there, but "Beeswax," "Mexican Seafood" and "Hairspray Queen" are the kinds of songs I would expect to hear from a band that would break up a few months later to go do other things. "Big Long Now," recorded during the Bleach sessions, is a clear step above the demo material, but it sounds a lot like the more sluggish and sludgy second-rate material of that album, as opposed to the best material from it. "Stain," released on the Blew EP, is much better, with its up-tempo pace and decent riffs that would have made it at least in the upper half of Bleach.

Things start to get much better once we move into the post-Bleach era of the band's life. "Dive" was originally intended for the band's followup to Bleach, before they switched labels and decided to make things poppier and slicker, and it speaks well for what the band planned to do on that album. Yes, it basically sounds like it could have fit onto Bleach without any difficulty, but it would have been one of the two or three best songs on that album, thanks in part to the stronger production, the great ascending riff in the chorus and the "DIVE! DIVE! DIVE! DIVE IN ME!!!" chorus. "Sliver," on the other hand, has the band clearly moving into a proto-Nevermind mindset, and while I'm not quite thrilled with the song (the endless "Grandma take me home!" chorus gets on my nerves a little bit, and had it been on Nevermind it probably would have been the worst song or close to it) it's still a decent enough song (and it's fascinating to me just how much it sounds like so much of the generic 90s pop-rock that still bores me while coming so far before the bulk of it).

The rest of the tracks come from a pair of BBC sessions done in 1990 and 1991. The 1990 session features three covers - "Turnaround" by Devo, "Molly's Lips" and "Son of a Gun" by The Vaselines - and they're fun bits of happy guitar-rock pep from a band that didn't usually do happy guitar-rock pep. The 1991 session has a couple of tracks that sound just like the recently released Nevermind ("Been a Son" absolutely would have been a highlight there, and "New Wave Polly" is just "Polly" done in a non-acoustic fashion), but the closing "Aneurysm" is something special that is the album's one significant bridge between what had come already and what would come next. The first minute seems to bounce between the Bleach and Nevermind styles with aplomb before the song abruptly switches into an anthemic explosion that weirdly reminds me of the more bombastic sections of Joy Division's "Dead Souls" in its best moments. Cobain's growly vocal over the grumbling riffs absolutely points the way to In Utero, and it's hard not to listen to this now without getting the sense that, already, trouble was brewing. It's definitely the album's best track, even without accounting for its metaphorical aspects.

With all of this considered, I warily give this collection a grade of 8, but this is an inconsistent 8; everything chronologically after "Stain" would probably get a grade of A, while the rest would be looking at something in the 6 range or lower. Then again, I suppose that, in some ways, an inconsistent 8 is the preferable way to go; the album has some definite good-to-great material to counter the bad, as opposed to 45 minutes of middling material that I kinda sorta like but would never really be in the mood for. If you feel like you just have to get more of the band's material after hearing the main releases, pick this up, but don't be surprised if you don't like it that much.

Where Nevermind had shown Cobain going out of his way to create an effective synthesis of his pop and noise-rock sides, this album puts those two sides into all-out war with each other. A few tracks could have fit onto Nevermind without too much difficulty; "Dumb" and "All Apologies" are clear candidates in this regard, and I suppose "Rape Me" would qualify with different lyrics. The rest of the songs, though, are either too angry, too screamy and/or too adventurous in the small details to have worked in a manner similar to the bulk of the Nevermind material. Some cynical observers have chalked this up to Cobain trying to appeal to both of his fanbases thus far, namely the underground fans of Bleach and the multitude of Nevermind fans, but quite frankly I find it hard to believe that Cobain cared in the least about any of his fans at that point. It would be far more accurate, it seems to me, to attribute this to Cobain trying to appeal to both sides of himself; he'd made Nevermind the way he did partly because he didn't like feeling pressure to make music similar to that on Bleach, and it makes sense that he'd music like that on In Utero because he didn't appreciate feeling pressure to make another album like Nevermind. And, well, I'm pretty fascinated by albums where the material indicates the artist in a state of self-contradiction, and in a situation like this I often find that material that would reasonably considered weaker in a stand-alone sense can be a source of strength simply from the contrast it offers to other material.

This album is one of the most emotionally intense albums I can think of, but I find it curious that, far from the intensity being a drag, this album always flies by for me much quicker than I'd normally expect it to. One very important reason for this is that the poppier material is spread out pretty evenly in the track listing, as if the band and producer Steve Albini wanted to provide the single-oriented tracks as islands in an ocean of noisy ambiguity. Even if "Heart-Shaped Box" and "Pennyroyal Tea" are too intense and static to have worked in the same way that the best Nevermind material worked, they still work as terrific singles in their own right, buoyed (as so much of the album's material is) by great guitar tones and passionate singing. "Rape Me" continues the band's tradition of having at least one rape-themed song per album (though in this case it's Cobain that's the victim, I guess), this time not making the least effort to hide the topic behind some kind of misdirection, but I find Kurt's syncopated riffage so intoxicating that I don't care about how unfortunate the title might be. "Dumb" may be a relative throwaway, but it's still a delightful bit of poppiness on an album that can use a delightful bit of poppiness. And finally, it's hard to imagine a successful tracklisting for the album that wouldn't feature "All Apologies" as the closer; from the charming up-and-down guitar line that drives the self-flagellating verses to the emotional blast of the singing in the chorus to the haunting repeated "All in all is all we are" at the end, there's not a moment in this song that I would change.

The "difficult" material (relatively speaking, of course; in some form these are all ultimately rock songs with standard rock instrumentation) is spread throughout the album in one-song or two-song chunks, and I find it useful to consider this material in these combinations. The opening salvo of "Serve the Servants" and "Scentless Apprentice" immediately makes it clear that Cobain is more than somewhat at odds with his audience; the initial lyric of "Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old" and his subsequent complaining about his family, combined with the somewhat clattery and disjointed guitar lines over the pounding drums, shows that Cobain had moved onto more substantial depression than before. "Scentless Apprentice" centers around a strident rising guitar line over awesome drumming from Grohl, all the while establishing a standard (often matched later in the album) for just how great the guitars are going to sound and just how forceful Cobain's delivery is going to be, and it's definitely my favorite of the "difficult" material on the album.

The aforementioned groups of material get a little less interesting and less coherent as the album progresses, until we come to "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" and "Tourette's," which are basically just Cobain screaming over fast distorted guitars, but I somewhat suspect that the gradual decline in coherence is on purpose, reflecting the gradual disintegration of Cobain's ability to deal with the world, punctuated by moments of clarity when he needed them (I'm definitely going a little more dimestore psychobabble with this hypothesis than I'd prefer, but it really seems to fit to me). In the middle, there's "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" (inspired by the biography of an actress who was eventually committed to a mental hospital and may or may not have had a lobotomy forced on her), a pounding rocker whose mid-song instrumental section is absolutely breathtaking in its simple brutality (it's in the running for my favorite stretch on the album). Maybe the bulk of it is relatively standard 90s hard rock (then again, wasn't Nirvana kinda inventing standard 90s hard rock?), but the band makes it work better far better than it might have in the hands of another band. Finally, sandwiched between "Dumb" and "Pennyroyal Tea," are "Very Ape" (two minutes of Bleach throwback that are definitely on par with the best material from that album) and "Milk It," which intersperses more of Nirvana's best heavy guitar-based intensity with chaotic guitar squeaks and squacks and Cobain doing his best primal scream exercises. Admittedly, these tracks might have passed me by in another context, but on this album, in this spot, they're awfully striking.

It's all a hypothetical exercise at this point, of course, but I really wonder where the band could have gone next after this album, or if Cobain would have even wanted to continue if he'd somehow gotten the help he needed. The sheer rage and exhaustion portrayed in this album point to somebody who wanted nothing to do with their life as presently constituted, and in listening to this it's really not shocking at all that he killed himself about a year after recording this album (and that doesn't even take into account the battles the band and Albini had to fight to get the album released). A tempting comparison point for this album is Joy Division's Closer, but while people tend to obsess over the dreary symbolism associated with that album, I think this album is much more blatant about telegraphing that it was going to be Nirvana's swansong than Closer was about being Joy Division's swansong, simply because Cobain was far more involved with all of the details that went into making In Utero than Ian Curtis was with the making of Closer (the other three members wrote most of the music for that album, and they sure didn't intend for it to be a big symbolic swansong). Even if Cobain had lived, however, I suspect that this album would hold up every bit as well as it currently does, and I recommend it very highly. I prefer Nevermind ever so slightly to this one for various reasons, but this is every bit as essential as that one is.

Aside from a couple of scattered tracks, I heard this a long time after I became acquainted with Nevermind and In Utero, and I regret this greatly, because this album deserves most of the praise it typically gets (aside from scattered naysayers). One thing that's clear is that the band put a tremendous amount of thought into how they could make this performance into something really special, as opposed to just a typical concert done with their amps turned off. Rather than trying to wedge "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "In Bloom" into an acoustic setting, the band's choices of original material to include focused on those songs that don't put a heavy emphasis on pounding guitars and loud noise, even if those songs aren't necessarily the band's biggest hits. They do include "Come As You Are," but the main selling point of that one had always been the bassline, as opposed to the various sounds Cobain coaxed out of his guitar in the original, and it fits naturally into the rest of the set. "Pennyroyal Tea" had a lot of noise and a great guitar tone in the original, yes, but the most important part of that one had been Cobain's delivery, and that carries well into this set (more haggard than before, but every bit as effective). All of the other choices make total sense as well, from the opening "About a Girl" (which Cobain introduces by acknowledging that most of the people there probably don't know because it's on their first album) to the penultimate "All Apologies" (which, given that this album came out after Cobain's death, is so harrowing that it's very difficult not to be affected by it).

Even more fascinating are the covers the band chose to include. Three ("Plateau," "Oh, Me," "Lake of Fire") come from the second album of The Meat Puppets, who were touring with Nirvana (and whom the band bring on stage for the performances), and Cobain's delivery in them is a hoot. "There's nothing at the top but a bucket and a mop/And an illustrated book about birds." If Kurt's goal was to try and get more people to buy Meat Puppets albums, then consider it Mission Accomplished with me. Elsewhere, there's a delightful Vaselines song called "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam," with Novoselic on accordion, and a great rendition of the old Lead Belly blues number "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" (sometimes referred to elsewhere as "In the Pines"), but the big star of the show is the band's cover of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World." I'm not an enormous fan of the album (it was Cobain's favorite Bowie album, oddly enough), but I like the title track a lot, and Cobain more than does it justice in his delivery. He pretty blatantly violates the spirit of the Unplugged setting by running his guitar through an amplifier, but the sound he produces when he plays the main guitar line is great as well, so I'm not going to complain. I guess it's a little sad that a lot of people thought this was a Nirvana original, but I'm not going to hold that against this version.

There was actually a brief moment when I considered giving this album the nod as Nirvana's best. The moment quickly passed, of course; after all, only half of it is Nirvana originals, and there are so many interesting songs on Nevermind and In Utero that I'd feel silly nudging this beyond them. In the end, though, the gap between those albums and this one, when the enjoyment and symbolism factors are all combined together, is essentially negligible, and while I can imagine somebody enjoying Nevermind but not In Utero, I can't see why somebody would enjoy both of those albums but somehow dislike this one (unless they just think acoustic guitars are stupid for some reason).

As much as I enjoy the individual performances, though, there's very little in the way of contrast between them, and I feel like, if you're going to go the multi-year compilation route with a live album (as opposed to drawing from a single show or tour, which can help give the sense that an album has successfully captured a moment in time), then variety between the different performances is important. As an example, take From Here to Eternity: Live, a 1-CD career-spanning live album released by The Clash in the late 90s. That album had a lot in the way of ferocious punk/hard-rock punch, but it also successfully demonstrated the band's love of reggae and funk and its ability to bring these to the stage, not to mention that it made a bold choice to end the album with the relatively gentle "Straight to Hell." Yes, I'm sure that this album accurately depicts the general sound of Nirvana's live performances, and I'm sure that it would have been a blast to see these performances in person, but they make for a less entertaining experience in aggregate than the individual performances should merit.

Still, the individual performances are great, and it's definitely a lot of fun to hear the Nevermind tracks stripped of their shine (of that lot, I especially find myself drawn towards the 1989 performance of "Breed"), and I can still give this a pretty high grade. If you're a Nirvana "purist" there's a good chance you could like this a good deal more than Unplugged, and even if you're not it's hard to say no to performances with this much energy.