Only CDs Is Sounding Like These # 41: Nirvana, “In Utero” (1993)

A new occasional series - CDs are coming back baby! And I’m here for it. BIGTIME!

A funny thing about getting hold of CDs again…it does make you listen to music differently, to listen to different music as well. It’s about revisitation, rightly. It’s about nostalgia. It can’t not be, by virtue of the format. And it’s about delivery, expectation, and the finite nature of an album playing once, and not instantly searching it find more in the vein of “if you like this try this”. You play the album, it sits, it lands, it finishes. You play another, or listen out for silence.

Well, look, I haven’t listened to Nirvana all that much for something like 25 years now. But 30 years ago, and for the few years before that when they burst on the seen, they were unavoidable, and also I was a fan. I can remember driving in to buy In Utero on tape in my penultimate year of school. I can remember being driven in to pick up Nevermind, a couple years before. I can even remember buying Incesticide and Bleach, all on tape first time around, all from the same store. Pretty much all on a Saturday morning. And then in the case of the two biggest albums I sat listening to them in my Walkman while I waited my turn to bat at cricket. Funny what you remember. (Or maybe what I remember). Anyway…

Nirvana was the biggest band in the land, for a time. Which means a lot of people say they didn’t like them, and they never did, and things like that because that always happens. But even people that claim to be immune to Smells Like Teen Spirit and the whole wave of appreciation around Nevermind, will often say they really did love In Utero. It is the band’s best album. And, yes, you can say Bleach all you like, and I might even want to agree with you deep down, but it’s In Utero, because it is so finite, so finished, so tight — but not at all polished, crucially, and the fact that it breathes is why it sounds like it lives still. But then again, we get back to finite. This album is closed off, but listening to it now feels like some kind of unfinished business. Where might they have gone after this? Well, they probably would have broken up, we still would have been given the Foo Fighters, regardless of whether we ever wanted that. And Kurt would have died still, or drifted off into nothingness, probably.

But we do not know what would have happened if he didn’t die so soon after this album.

Since buying and finding and being given CDs again, I’ve listened to Nirvana more in the last year than I have in the last ten or twenty years. Which doesn’t mean heaps, but it means a lot in comparison to what it was. And it clearly means a lot to me too — or else why try write this?

I’ve had a few goes at summing up the Nirvana thing over the years.

But it always changes.

I do know that I’ve always loved In Utero. And right now I’m as in love with it as when I first heard it. And, yes, I do want to find it on cassette tape again. No, I’d never care for it on vinyl. But for now CD is better than any other format. It feels right. Especially because we get the hidden tracks of the CD-era too, which were their own special treat.

Or they weren’t? But even if they weren’t…they still were!

What is undeniable, though, is the greatness on this album, and the greatness of this album. From start —

— to finish:

And all points in-between. Defining record of the 90s, and it sounds both effortless and incredibly laboured. Just as all things that last should.