Monday 7 May 2007

NIRVANA - INCESTICIDE (DGC)


NIRVANA – INCESTICIDE (DGC)

With hindsight this is a very well put together collection/compilation, especially when compared to the horrible mess that was the With The Lights Out boxset.

Considered by many to be something of a Christmas cash in upon release in 1992, with no follow up to Nevermind on the horizon, and indeed a lot of threat/worry of the band actually splitting up being rumoured/murmured, with a surprisingly large wealth of recorded tracks to choose from, this was something of an attempt to stem the tide of all the bootleggers releasing the unreleased tracks and win back some money otherwise going into the pockets of industrious music entrepreneurs. At the time Nirvana was hot.

The first time I heard of Incesticide was when John Peel played “Mexican Seafood” one Friday night when I casually came across his radio show waiting for The Word and other such moronic nineties Friday night TV shows (that actually were ten times superior to the current crop of subtly left propaganda). For a moment there I thought all of Peel’s radio shows sounded this good.

The cover artwork was always startling to me, too close to the cover of the Lithium single with Cobain indulging once more in his melted and charred doll fetish. Perhaps he should have been a chef in some capacity, especially in the light of being not only an expert in chargrilling babies but also cooking toxic substances.

My original copy of this was on cassette. It was a Christmas gift to me in 1992 and being a cassette it would often get chewed up in my yellow boombox. The warping of the intro of “Dive” was a sound both horrific and interesting to me.

There was some disappointment attached to the UK release of the record as it lacked the inflammatory liner notes that the weekly music papers reported so wildly. As a result of this when I went to America (Florida) the following May getting a copy of the US version of Incesticide was at the top of my retail agenda.

Musically the album is a lot more solid than it is remembered for. The fifteen tracks tend to be the ones with the highest production values of the tracks available, not least the ones that were recorded at the BBC for various sessions for various DJs (John Peel AND Mark Goodier?).

The aforementioned “Mexican Seafood” is easily one of the highlights with its cute fuzzy pop hooks while in the process just about failing to reach the two-minute mark. The two Vaselines covers are so frighteningly similar but equally scarily catchy and instantly memorable and served as many people’s favourite numbers from the collection, people without any idea who The Vaselines were and probably still do not.

With “Aneurysm” already being a solid staple of the live set it provided the perfect album closer with which to send the album on a high note (it is notable that there is a distinct lack of acoustic meanders on the record). A ace up the sleeve was to be found in the proceeding tracks before the closer as the lumbering “Aero Zeppelin” and “Hairspray Queen” saw the band at their heaviest almost veering off into some kind of psychedelic direction while apparently indulging into rock clichés that were never too much for these tunes.

Compared to the studio records Incesticide really holds up strongly against the more famous Nirvana releases and towers head and shoulders above the boxset and the elements of dross that have spewed there from. This record still tops 99% of any guitar music released since.

Thesaurus moment: underdog

Nirvana
DGC

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