Now Listening: Bleach

This is my attempt to reconcile my newfound powers of streaming, my desire to write about the music I listen to, and my need to listen to something about a squajillion times before I feel like I can put down my opinions on it. Maybe this format will take off, maybe it won't, but this will be where I write about something, more or less in the moments that I'm listening to it: transient thoughts, but not concrete or final enough to merit a "review."

I've been listening to Nirvana's Bleach all evening. I've always been a huge Nirvana fan, of course, and yet I'm still hesitant to move in beyond the edges of their music. First there's the hits and monumental cuts. Then there's the cuts I really like: "Drain You," "School," "On a Plain," "Been a Son," "Love Buzz," "Breed," "Dumb," "Serve the Servants" to a lesser extent. "Sliver," if it's not considered in the first category. That's more or less by design: the deeper you go, the more abrasive and deliberately unpleasant the music gets: harder, more raw, less pleasurable for its own sake. For the faithful only. There are bits like this on Nevermind, too, and In Utero is practically made of it. Some would probably say that's the BEST thing about Nirvana, and they're allowed to.

I like a lot of songs on Bleach, but it is justly dismissed compared to the other two real Nirvana albums: hell, it could even be the case that Incesticide has more juice on it. I think the distinction Bleach has is that it's the first one, the first piece of Nirvana on record, and it absolutely does not represent what's to come for that band. They sound very undistinguished: raw, and competent, and like they've got something but haven't quite figured out how to show it. Showing it was always the big issue with Nirvana: how, how much, to what end. Easier to make a big noise and scare off people. Coming at the beginning of the discography, even with the benefit of hindsight, you're still squinting a bit to see Nirvana in that mess: it's there, in "About a Girl," and even "Floyd the Barber" and "Mr. Moustache" and all over. But mostly it sounds loud and hard and fast-slow. It's too human to be metal, too sludgy and un-pointed to be punk, so without the context of the grudge revolution, I can see how it was dismissed even by a lot of the small audience it did have in 1989: there must've been more eyebrow-raising acts on the Subpop label at the time. It's a not-great album by a great band that isn't "there" yet.