So why is Nirvana’s In Utero on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
I saw Nirvana perform live in the fall of 1993 in Buffalo, New York as part of the band’s tour to support In Utero.
It’s easily a Top 5 concert experience for me, and probably more like Top 3.*
* I know you’re obviously interested in this, so I’ll add that seeing Rage Against the Machine in Manhattan a few years later, and then catching R.E.M. at the tail end of their career at the Hollywood Bowl in LA in the mid-2000s are my other highest concert highlights.
I was a student at Binghamton University at the time and had a group of high school friends up at SUNY Buffalo, so it worked out perfectly to road trip to the western end of New York to catch the show.
Here are some memories from seeing Nirvana perform live – which would turn out to be less than six months out from their final performance (March 1st, 1994, in Munich, Germany):
- Upon entering the concert venue on a chilly Buffalo night, the security people mockingly invited everyone to “open up your flannels.” I can’t recall if we actually got patted down, but it was in relation to going through security.
- The mosh pit was intense, as one would expect, but at one point I managed to mosh/swim through the crowd to get fairly close to the stage.
- Kurt Cobain made a crack about the Alumni Arena feeling like a “fishbowl” at one point.
- More than anything, I remember that the music sounded incredible, as good or better than I could have hoped for.
- There was a good mix of material from the band’s studio albums, and all of the new (at the time) songs sounded fantastic, including “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” (which opened the show), “Rape Me,” and “Heart-Shaped Box.”
- This helpful website says that the encore concluded with a performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and calls it a jam that involves Nirvana and Yamatsuka Eye on vocals, Yoshimi P-WE on trumpet, and Krist Novoselic on accordion. What I recall of the encore did not sound like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the slightest, but was a really long explosion of noise rock and feedback that included Cobain pointing his electric guitar at various speakers to create various shrieking sounds, and I’m pretty sure he aggressively messed around with the In Utero props on the stage.
Turning to In Utero the album, it’s a bit astonishing to consider that it’s only one of three “official” Nirvana studio albums, and the final one at that. Thankfully, the band produced a wealth of other high-quality material during their relatively brief time as an active outfit, but this is the last collection of songs that Nirvana put out into the world while Kurt Cobain was still among us.
Going even deeper, In Utero is the only official “follow up” studio album to the earth shatteringly popular Nevermind. I point this out as the band – and Kurt Cobain specifically – had in mind to create a record that was less mainstream in sound versus that album and therefore somewhat more challenging to the band’s massive hordes of “grunge music”-consuming fans. To help with this purpose, Nirvana brought in Steve Albini as producer, who helped craft a caustic and blistering sound across many of In Utero’s tracks.
If you don’t believe me, throw on “Scentless Apprentice” at a high volume and I believe you’ll agree.
For me, my favorite “heavy” tracks on In Utero feel less caustic and more thrashy, fabulous wild releases of dark punk rock energy, exquisitely refined and honed for maximum head banging impact. There are a bunch of songs on In Utero that qualify, but I’ll call out crunchily delicious “Very Ape,” the wildly kinetic “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” (a song title dripping in 1990s Gen X irony), and especially the manic sonic maelstrom of “Tourette’s.”
Of the slower/softer songs included on In Utero, “All Apologies” and “Pennyroyal Tea” are just fine in my view, but give me the sublime “Dumb” of this group every time. All of these shine even brighter on the brilliant Unplugged (#12 of best 1,000 albums ever), as aside.
“Heart-Shaped Box,” arguably the most popular song off of In Utero, has a killer hook, a classic soft/loud dynamic, and a peculiar-yet-compelling heavy rock/grunge thing going for it all at the same time.
If you focus on the guitar part during the chorus, you can really hear how super non-mainstream Steve Albini’s production is.
A song with a title of “Rape Me” is automatically going to be at least a bit controversial, and it certainly was back in 1993. You can dig up interviews with Kurt Cobain from the time where he’s adamant that it’s an anti-rape song, and I for one completely believe him.
Musically, it’s upper tier Nirvana – which is to say it’s terrific. A classic undistorted Cobain guitar chord progression explodes into Cobain wailing I’m not the only one I’m not the only one. And then it builds and builds from there.
On a final note, I love the hell out of the line I miss the comfort in being sad on the great “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle.”
In Utero is the one studio album that Nirvana produced after they had become incredibly famous, and you can feel and hear a lot of Cobain’s uneasiness with getting what he (and the band) wanted, but more than anything you can feel a lot of a great artist’s anguish and pain as he neared the end of his tragically short life.
(All) apologies for ending this piece on a bummer note, but it’s noteworthy that In Utero can so compellingly make us feel those feelings across three decades plus and counting now.
Nirvana’s In Utero Some stats & info about Nirvana – In Utero
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Indie Rock, Punk Rock, Grunge, Alternative Rock, Seattle Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #173
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was In Utero released? 1993
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #61 out of 1,000
Nirvana’s In Utero on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Nirvana’s In Utero that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.