|
 The
Major Lift
By
Erik Hage
If
Kurt Cobain hadn’t committed suicide in 1994, he’d now be
42 years old—an idea that is not hard to fathom, for in life
and art Cobain never seemed to resonate the bloom of youth
so much as the accumulated pain of seasoned adulthood. And
I wish I could say that I was ahead of the curve with Nirvana
and purchased Bleach when it originally came out in
1989, but like most of the world I first encountered Nirvana
through the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video on MTV in 1991,
and it’s a moment that has stuck with me. (I recall walking
through the student lounge in NYU’s Brittany Hall and being
stopped dead in my tracks by the song on the big-screen TV.)
To have this kind of raw, challenging, sometimes abrasive
music come out from under the cover of “alternative” niches
and dive into the pulsing waters of the mainstream meant a
whole paradigm shift; thus, Nirvana became the band who not
only delivered the death blow to hair metal and helped spur
on grunge, but who reconfigured ideas of “alternative” music
in general. No longer the domain of college radio, boutique
MTV shows in the after hours, or hip record stores, Nirvana
became a viable commercial entity. (Surely zeitgeist-mates
Pearl Jam had their own estimable influence; the constipated
howls of Nickelback, Creed, and countless other “today’s rock”-format
bands attest to that.)
 Bleach,
cut on the cheap for less than a thousand dollars for Sub
Pop, came before all that. But the album retroactively benefited
from Nevermind, eventually achieving platinum status.
Personally, I don’t think that Nirvana ever made a career-defining
album and worked in an ultimately limited idiom (had Kurt
lived, though, one suspects that he would have found new artistic
purchase—and not lapsed into godawful concept albums like
Green Day did). This 20th-anniversary deluxe edition of Bleach
shows an album that holds up well, however, with this pre-Dave
Grohl incarnation of Nirvana already displaying the paradoxical
blend of melodic deftness and abrasive torrents that would
make Nirvana an entire musical movement. Nevertheless, the
best track on the album, “About a Girl,” proves what Kurt
Cobain had told us all along about himself: He’s also a master
appropriator. Much has been made of his absorption of the
Pixies, Melvins, and Mudhoney, but “About a Girl” is a straight-up
rip-off of the Smithereens’ “Blood and Roses.” Bassist Krist
Novoselic even mentioned in a 2002 Rolling Stone interview
how, pre-Bleach, the band “had one tape we listened
to in the van. . . . On one side was the Smithereens. And
on the other side was this heavy-metal band, Celtic Frost.”
(This fact seemed to be lost on a recent RS reviewer,
who saw in the song “abraded Lennon-McCartney chord changes”—hmm,
could that be because the Smithereens were Beatle-philes?
I can’t do all of the heavy lifting.)
I suppose the key question is whether Bleach would
remain little more than a curiosity if it weren’t for the
outsized success that the band would later enjoy. I’m not
sure, but Bleach remains a great listen. If Pearl Jam
had ever recorded a track half as sharp and powerful as “School,”
I would have 10 times more respect for their music. Elsewhere,
however, Nirvana seem all scorch and edge with no meter—such
as in “Scoff” and “Negative Creep” (the latter a rough prototype
of intention for In Utero’s dazzling, torching, and
more controlled “Radio Unit Friendly Shifter”). And as much
as I am wary of concert recordings tacked onto reissues, the
Portland, Ore., show from Feb. 9, 1990 (my 21st birthday,
for what that’s worth) shows what a strong live unit the band
were long before Nevermind. Frankly, having knocked
out the Bleach LP in a five-hour studio session, they
would have to have been.
 Jet-setting
progeny Julian Casablancas emerged as a whole different
brand of “alternative” frontman with the Strokes early in
the millennium, but breaks out on his new solo album, Phrazes
for the Young, with a whole different approach. Synthesizers
and beats rule the day on this effort, an intention that shouldn’t
be dismissed out-of-hand for a man whose voice is typically
couched in off-kilter, charming guitar-pop. But this album
never gels. The synth noodlings of “Glass” come off more Genesis
than forward-thinking; “11th Dimension” seems standard dance-club
fare; “Ludlow St.” is a strange country music/electropop amalgam;
and the potential breakout song, the strident and tuneful
“Out of the Blue,” never approaches the kind of hook that
the Strokes could summon at will. Elsewhere, the disco pop
of “Left & Right in the Dark” confirms my creeping suspicion
that Casablancas is bound to become the Bryan Ferry of the
contemporary era.
But I suppose the strangest personal development this month
is that I am spending a lot of time listening to the soundtrack
from that new vampire . . . thing. The Twilight Saga:
New Moon is a great soundtrack to a movie I have no
intentions to see (based on a book series that I will never
read). Death Cab for Cutie continue their multiyear run of
alarmingly good songs with the turgid but pretty “Meet Me
on the Equinox,” while the Killers vamp their way through
the new-romantic goth of “A White Demon Love Song.” Grizzly
Bear don’t fare as well with “Slow Life,” because of the band’s
typical focus on atmospherics over songcraft. But, like Death
Cab for Cutie, Sea Wolf inject some energy into the largely
doomy and downbeat affair with “Violet Hour.” (Here is a band
who continue to remind me of Echo and the Bunnymen, in all
of the right ways.) There are also standout tracks by Thom
Yorke, Bon Iver, Muse, and Editors. Here’s one that really
snuck up on me; a trashy mass-media phenomena has spawned
what is quite simply a great collection of songs from the
hearty corps of the alt elite.
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