Nirvana :: Better Nevermind (Well...Whatever Version) & Better In Utero (1993 Steve Albini Mixes)

Nirvana :: Nevermind...Well, Whatever Version

1. Smells Like Teen Spirit        (Live on Top of the Pops - 28 November 1991)
2. In Bloom                              (Smart Mix)
3. Come As You Are                (Devonshire Mix)
4. Breed                                    (Devonshire Mix)
5. Lithium                                 (Smart Mix)
6. Polly                                     (Smart Mix)
7. Territorial Pissings               (Devonshire Mix)
8. Drain You                             (BBC John Peel Session)
9. Lounge Act                           (Devonshire Mix)
10. Pay to Play                         (Stray Away Original Version - Smart Mix)
11. On a Plain                           (Devonshire Mix)
12. Something in the Way        (Devonshire Mix)
13. Endless, Nameless             (BBC John Peel Session)

 

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30 years of Nevermind, and they are still finding ways to make it sound worse. This year's Super Deluxe 30th anniversary reissue gets yet another reslickening and glossifying in the remastering laboratories for optimal consumer enjoyment. Take a scroll through Spotify and you'll see that there are way more versions of Nirvana albums than there needs to be. But there's an interesting story as to why this is the case and why mixing actually matters.

 

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Elliott Smith - The Miser of Heat - and The Subliminal Conformity of Masculinity

 

For a long time, I had trouble getting into Elliott Smith's work with his previous band, Heatmiser. I don't know what I was hoping for, but it didn't quite scratch my itch for more Elliott Smith. Then, I finally made it to their last album, Mic City Sons, and I recognized the song "Half Right." It's a slightly jazzed up, full band version of my favorite sombre acoustic song on New Moon, the posthumous Elliott Smith rarities compilation. Through the Heatmiser albums, you can trace a transition from the more prevalent hard rock that was popular in the '90s to something more personal that would lead Elliott to his solo career. So I cobbled together Elliott's Heatmiser songs into a mixtape that could sound like an Elliott Smith album.

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Nirvana :: I Hate Myself and I Want to Die

Nirvana :: I Hate Myself and I Want to Die

I decided to bring this post back to life in honor of the new Montage of Heck documentary and album that just came out. Nirvana had quite a few good rarities, but none of them have ever been made into a faithful collection. The documentary is an interesting piece, because it doesn't portray Kurt Cobain favorably and it seems that his public image has changed quite a bit since he passed.

It seems that in a lot of ways Nirvana has become a cultural product with the meaning stripped from it just like  Kurt always feared. Nirvana shirts are still being sold as fashion items and can hang on racks directly beside Guns and Roses shirts, when the bands stood for polar opposite things. Axel Rose penned some racist and homophobic songs like "One in a Million," with the lyrics, "immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me. They come to our country and think they'll do as they please." In contrast, Kurt was a feminist and outspoken about LGBTQ rights and a very outspoken anti-consumerist and anti-authoritarian. He was trapped in a misogynist, capitalist industry that he was fighting publicly and this side of him often gets overlooked. 

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The infamous 1985 Nirvana demos :: Fecal Matter - Illiteracy will Prevail

Get the tracks here

Torrent mirror  

 

Long thought to no longer exist, the holy grail for Nirvana fans was the 1985 demo tape for a project Kurt Cobain called Fecal Matter. There were a couple of fakes that famously circulated around the internet, but this version is a legitimate recording. There are files out there that have been edited and remastered by amateur engineers, which is mostly what can be found on youtube. So, this version is intended to preserve the initial, unedited leak.

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