Nirvana's In Utero (2006)

Gillian Gaar's contribution to the 33-1/3 shelf is a fast and fun read, one of the better I've seen of the more straightforward volumes in the series. This is because there are interesting sideline stories about this album and because Gaar has the skill to chase down the details and make it a good story altogether—which it should be, given that it's Kurt Cobain's last studio project. He gave us a great live set in the Unplugged show and that was it. Full disclosure: I know Gillian, and I can still be nostalgic for those days of 1993. One notorious storyline of In Utero was Steve Albini's participation as producer/engineer, which was a moiling cloud of media confusion at the time. Gaar spoke to Albini years later and his sober perspective is one of the best parts of this book. She spares us as much of the drama as she can regarding Courney Love, Frances Bean, Axl Rose, Cobain's fraught relations with reporters, etc., but inevitably some of that is here. We are also spared a good deal of Cobain's angst, but that is just as inevitably here too, including the stomachaches and plagues of insecurity. Mostly she shows us a group of professionals intent on getting things done. They largely produced about half of a great album, with some of his best songs alternating with noise squalls that somehow sound a lot better than I remembered. In the track-by-track rundown section (also inevitable in most of these books), Gaar does a good job of sorting out and analyzing these squalls and accords them the punk-rock respect Cobain sought in them. She never stack-ranks the Nirvana albums, but makes an interesting point that listening to Bleach, Nevermind, and In Utero together makes the development of the band clear. As always you have to wonder how far it might have gone. Dave Grohl has reinvented himself as a rock star as surely as New Order rose from the ashes of Joy Division. I will say I don't hate him the way some do. Gaar, writing in 2006, doesn't have much to say about Grohl or Krist Novoselic either, apart from their contributions to In Utero, which of course were significant.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.