FEATURE:
Love Buzz
Nirvana’s Bleach at Thirty-Five
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ONE of the most important…
IN THIS PHOTO: Nirvana in Hoboken, 13th July, 1989 (via Medium)
debut albums ever is also one of the most underrated. On 15th June, 1989, Nirvana released Bleach. In a year that saw an explosion of Pop and essential Hip-Hop, maybe Nirvana’s Grunge sound was not as widely appreciated as it should have been. It does seem that some were a bit dismissive of Bleach. An album that is far stronger than it has been given credit for. Released through Sub Pop, this incredible debut album was produced by Jack Endino. What is noticeable about Bleach is the lack of Dave Grohl. Chad Channing plays on the album. Though his parts are perfectly fine, one reason why 1991’s Nevermind is so iconic and powerful is the technical skill and gravitas Grohl injects. Not to say that Bleach received negative views. Far from it. It has received love from a range of critics from its release to now. I feel it is one of those albums that got some positivity in 1989 but has grown in stature through the years – unlike Nevermind, which was an established classic in 1991. Thirty-five years later, you can hear and feel the influence of Bleach running through contemporary bands. I will end with a couple of reviews for Bleach’s twentieth anniversary release from 2009. Before that, there are a few features I want to highlight. I want to start out with this feature from 2019. It waxed lyrical about a classic album that still stands up after all of this time. Approaching it in 2019 – thirty years after its release:
“Nirvana’s debut was released by Sub Pop Records on this exact day 30 years ago. Bleach was recorded for only $606, a frugal amount for the trio consisting of Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and then-drummer Chad Channing. (Nirvana went through a slew of drummers — four in total — before landing its most permanent, Dave Grohl.)
The album was recorded at Reciprocal Recording, which was located in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. The tiny, triangular studio, run by Chris Hanzsek, Jack Endino, and Rich Hinklin, remains iconic for its indie commissions from bands all over the US in those days, most of which were acts associated with C/Z Records, Twin Tone, Amphetamine Reptile, and the aforementioned Sub Pop. The studio is also known for being the birthplace of “grunge” music, having recorded early albums by bands such as Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Green River.
On January 23, 1989, Nirvana recorded their first demo with Jack Endino, who sent a copy to Sub Pop afterwards; a few months later, Nirvana returned to the studio to record Bleach for the label. Humble beginnings for a record that has sold over two million copies and remains Sub Pop’s best-selling release.
Over the course of 30 years, Bleach has been assessed and dissected again and again — deemed by some as the ultimate “grunge” album and by most as a seminal record in the “genre” … you may be wondering why I’m putting “grunge” and “genre” inside quotation marks. It’s because grunge isn’t a genre of music; it’s a subculture — one defined by certain emotional traits and one very much influenced by the environment from which it emerged.
It was Nirvana’s Nevermind that brought the attention of “grunge” to the masses, and as game-changing as that record was — I don’t think anyone is arguing that it wasn’t — it was its embryonic predecessor that really encapsulates what it means to be “grunge.” Bleach, not Nevermind, evokes The Pacific Northwest. No, it doesn’t represent the vegan-eating, beer-brewing hipsters with square-framed glasses or any cliche now associated with the region. (Let’s be real; those are all the transplants who moved here because suddenly it was cool. Thanks a lot, Fred Armisen!) Bleach represents The Pacific Northwest and us who inhabit it in our purest form.
Bleach sounds raw, authentic, emotive, anxiety-ridden — a perfect match for the neurotic, depressed, and highly anxious Northwest personality — and like a product of the same environment that shaped the region’s inhabitants. In The Pacific Northwest, the passive, apathetic, and disenfranchised teenager grows up to be that same adult, a result of being raised in, and staying in, a land of perpetual rain where you see more darkness than light. The pop magnificence that everyone heard on Nevermind was the more polished, more easily digestible version of the sentiment on Bleach. Nevermind had the same guttural wails of frustration and isolation without being buried in sludge, but lacked the real teenage-angst sensibility that’s found on Bleach.
When I hear Kurt Cobain harmonizing with himself on the raging punk track “Negative Creep”, or echoing through the sludge, “You’re in high school again/ You’re in high school again,” on “School”, I’m instantly filled with a painful self-awareness and anxiety — the same kind I felt as a teenager listening to the record for the first time and realizing, like “School” alludes to, that you never really leave high school and that the world falls into the same pointless patterns, no matter where you are or how old you become — a sentiment that really has followed me into my adult life.
There’s an ongoing joke that everyone from The Pacific Northwest is perpetually 17 and filled with angst. I’ll give Fred Armisen this: the dream of the ’90s is still very much alive here, but that’s because it never really left. This is just who we are. The music and lyrics on Bleach sound like they are being chewed up and spat out, and there’s a tension and aggression we identify with, a kind that differs from the zeitgeist captured on Nevermind and the rest of Nirvana’s discography, which the rest of the world claimed for themselves when Seattle blew up. The idea behind songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are” is that the youth of the time could only muster up a shrug and mumble, and through a good ear for pop hooks and lyrics, this punk band was able to encapsulate an entire generation of frustrated and dissatisfied youth.
However, what this assessment fails to understand is that even after the Seattle Sound and all that came with it, including hordes of cultural invaders, had faded in the late ’90s, the feelings and sentiments stirred by Nirvana are still very much alive with every generation produced in The Pacific Northwest. While outsiders have keepsakes and artifacts from that heady time, we are still very much reveling in it and living it. Not in the hysteria but in the underlying, ineradicable ideas that define who we are as a people. And this comes from more than just being young and scrimping out an existence in a nothing town outside larger cities.
Bleach captures more than just the societal snippet of “grunge” with its slower tempos, dissonant harmonies, complex instrumentation, and angst-filled lyrics that often address themes of social alienation, apathy, confinement, and a desire for freedom — themes that stem from living in a place where there are more trees than people and where a feeling of being suffocated by landscape is inherited”.
If many see Nevermind as the commercial breakthrough and this iconic album, and its follow-up – and the band’s final album together -, In Utero, as Nirvana at their rawest and most genuine, perhaps most see Bleach as a ‘promising debut’. Listen harder and you will find it is much more than that! This feature from last year examined and highlighted a caustic debut that was the precursor and stepping stone to Nevermind. Even in 1989, Nirvana were sowing seeds to music that would change the sound of music. Announce them as one of the defining bands of their generation. Kurt Cobain establishing himself as a peerless and unique songwriter:
“Future Seattle luminaries such as Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney had already swung by for sessions at Endino’s Reciprocal Studio, and Nirvana’s first demo also opened doors for them. It caught the attention of Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of the iconic indie label Sub Pop, who went on to release the band’s first single – a cover of Dutch psych-rockers Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz” – during the autumn of 1988.
Propelled by Novoselic’s spidery basslines, Cobain’s slashing, psych-flecked guitar, and his grainy but charismatic howl, “Love Buzz” offered the world the first taste of Nirvana’s future greatness. Though only initially available as the first of Sub Pop’s limited-pressing Singles Club releases, the record also achieved international recognition, with UK rock weeklies Sounds and Melody Maker both awarding the song their Single Of The Week accolade.
Cobain and Novoselic were joined by new drummer Chad Channing for “Love Buzz,” and he remained on board for Bleach: the product of several short but intensive sessions with Jack Endino at Reciprocal across the festive season of 1988 and January ’89, which reputedly set the band back a mere $600.
In keeping with the emerging Seattle grunge sound, Bleach was loud, heavy, and uncompromising, with most of its key moments – “School,” “Blew,” and the dark, tortured primal scream of “Negative Creep” – owing a debt of gratitude to metal/hard rock forebears such as Black Sabbath, along with Nirvana’s Seattle contemporaries Melvins, whose pioneering sludgecore sound was highly rated by Cobain.
Bleach’s stand-out track, though, prototyped the sound that would deliver Nirvana onto the global stage. The Beatles’ early albums and The Knack’s Get The Knack were regulars on Cobain’s stereo as his band prepared their debut, and these notably more melodic influences compelled him to write his first straight-ahead pop-rock love song, “About A Girl,” about his then-girlfriend, Tracy Marander.
Nirvana credited their friend Jason Everman in the Bleach sleevenotes, though Everman didn’t appear on the album. He did, however, briefly join the band as second guitarist for the nationwide US tour following the record’s release: a trek which resulted in several popular album cuts such as “Blew,” “Love Buzz” and the transcendent “About A Girl” becoming college-radio staples.
Though not a Billboard 200 hit until it was reissued after the success of Nevermind, Bleach did sterling work in launching Nirvana internationally. Having attracted rave reviews, including one from the NME, which suggested that Nirvana’s debut was “the biggest, baddest sound that Sub Pop have so far managed to unearth”, Bleach’s grassroots success led to a much-acclaimed UK and European tour in late ’89 and galvanized Kurt Cobain into composing songs such as “Breed,” “Polly” and “In Bloom,” which would bag Nirvana a major record deal and lead to them dramatically reshaping the future of rock’n’roll”.
There are a couple of other features/reviews I will finish with. Before that, Albumism took a look inside Bleach in 2019. Three decades since it came into the world, its meaning and impact had grown and evolved. It is perhaps not shocking that Bleach struggled slightly in 1989. Such a vital and huge year, commercial success went to other genres and artists. That is not to say Bleach was unworthy of more focus. It should have a lot more copies. I feel it has been embraced and appreciated more in subsequent years:
“Despite being rush recorded for just over six hundred dollars at Reciprocal Recording Studio in Seattle (later Sleater-Kinney would record their 1997 album Dig Me Out there) the production remains muscular and pulsating throughout. Nirvana’s reputation as a solid live band allowed them to translate this onto record and produce a set of songs that fizzled with young energy. At no point does the listener believe the recording is below par or in any way sounding rushed. The only complaint in the recording/production of Bleach is the weak inclusion of Chad Channing’s drums that, in comparison to Cobain’s crunchy guitar and Novoselic’s rumbling bass, appear undercooked, tired and tinny. Channing was and is a solid drummer, but the recording doesn't capture his energy well. The drum sound quality only improves when Melvins drummer Dale Crover takes up the stool for “Floyd the Barber,” “Paper Cuts” and “Downer.”
Still, all this is in retrospect. Bleach, alongside In Utero (1993) made zero sense to me at the time of initial listening. I wrote about In Utero for this very publication last year for its 25 anniversary. The basic premise in that article was that in order to access and understand the music contained on In Utero there needed to be the required time and effort made by the listener to engage with it on its own terms. Being young, dumb and full of...er...fun, In Utero and its anguish was not immediately accessible to me. As time wore on, the majesty of the record began to have its way. Slow at first, but then with great impact. Once In Utero was deciphered and made sense, so did Bleach.
I’m not saying it was easy. Like In Utero, there was an angle to the record. Start with the bouncy and boppy songs to find the groove and then launch into the heavier stuff. Bleach shares something with In Utero and perhaps one can’t be understood without the other. Both, try as they might, bury the pop sensibilities underneath feedback wails, chainsaw-like guitars, and Cobain’s more exaggerated vocal performances. It makes for an uneasy listening experience, but a rewarding one when it all clicks.
Upon listening to the record thirty years on to reacquaint myself for this very article it can’t help but be noted how infectious and immediate the music is. How in parts the grunts, drawls, and wails of Cobain sound much like the vocal stylistics of the era’s more flamboyant frontmen. Bleach was one of many records that kicked open the doors to a new era, but it borrowed from previous musical eras to achieve it. In the mix are punk, glam rock, sludge metal, sixties ditties, and straight-up pop. It is in essence a definitive Nirvana record.
Bleach has been reassessed over the years as a Grunge standard and has rightly sold in the millions. It encapsulates the frustration and dissatisfaction of being young and eking out an existence in a subpar town when the world is there for the taking. In fact, anyone wishing to distill and understand the sound and era of those times could do no worse than to listen to Bleach in full. It really is the very definition of the strange and short lived Grunge genre”.
I will actually finish with an NME feature rather than a second review of the Deluxe Edition of Bleach. Pitchfork reviewed the album in 2009. To mark its twentieth anniversary, Sub Pop reissued the album with a 1990 live show as a bonus. Also, their legendary 1992 set at Reading was finally given a DVD/CD release:
“The line between cool and uncool has never been less defined: We live in a world where Hall and Oates have become as influential to emergent indie-rockers as Joy Division, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" has become as much of a hipster-bar last-call anthem as "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". And yet, even in an era of omnivorous musical consumption and boundless genre tourism, the sight of a computerized Kurt Cobain belting out Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" in a recent Guitar Hero 5 demo reel was enough to revert the good/bad taste divide back to 1988 borders. For Nirvana fans, the Guitar Hero scandal was more than just a case of a dead rock-star's visage being exploited for the sake of peddling product. Few artists treated record collections as an extension of personal politics quite like Cobain; having him sing a hair-metal hit is not just contrary to his musical taste, but his entire value system. (Though one can't help but wonder what a guy who once skewered alpha-male behavior in a song called "Mr. Moustache" would make of indie's current facial-hair fetish.)
And yet, Cobain was no stranger himself to challenging accepted notions of cool. When it first emerged 20 years ago, Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, represented an equally heretical notion to some indie aesthetes: Flipper-grade sludge-punk molded into Beatles-schooled pop schematics. By 1989, indie rock was already making a rightward shift across the radio dial-- Dinosaur Jr. had covered Peter Frampton, the Butthole Surfers were dropping in not-too-subtle Black Sabbath and Zeppelin references-- but rather than using post-hardcore noise to desecrate their traditional FM-radio influences, Nirvana used it to give their dinosaur rock more teeth. In Cobain, they had a frontman with uncommonly melodic instincts, but shot through a voice that sounded like it was coughing up blood; in Krist Novoselic, a bassist who could hit the heretofore untapped sweet spot between Paul McCartney and the Melvins.
But unlike most rock bands who divided pop history between before and after, Nirvana's impact was not immediate. Upon its release, Bleach was a modest indie rock success at 40,000 copies sold, and the album's low-budget legend-- it was recorded for a scant $600, footed by the band's temporary second guitarist, Jason Everman-- often overshadows the music within. At that point, Nirvana had yet to divest itself of its Pete Best: drummer Chad Channing, whose scrappy style wasn't fully suited to the band's growing propensity for crater-inducing stompers. (Three Bleach tracks-- "Floyd the Barber", "Paper Cuts", and "Downer"-- were actually helmed by Melvins thud-master Dale Crover, and you can really tell.) And the album's first single-- a cover of 1960s Dutch-popsters Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz"-- is more emblematic of the dementoid new wave that Nirvana would indulge in on their future B-sides than the metallic Pixies-punk that would turn them into stars.
But rather than unfairly compare it to the platinum sheen of sophomore release Nevermind, Bleach is best appreciated today as a snapshot of a specific time and place, of a Seattle scene bubbling up before it turned into a media adjective: In the Aero Zeppelin grind of "School" and the Mudhoney-quoting scum-bucket thrash of "Negative Creep", you have the perfect audio manifestation of the stark, exhilarating black-and-white Charles Peterson photos that captured late-80s Seattle like a series of strobe-light flickers (and which populate much of this reissue's 52-page photo booklet). Original producer Jack Endino's new remastering job gives Bleach a much-needed boost in fidelity, but there's an intrinsic, primordial murkiness to this album that can't be polished-- while Axl was welcoming the masses into the Sunset Strip jungle, Nirvana dragged the Sub Pop set into the bleak, chilly backwoods from which they came.
Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half-- anchored by the epochal anti-love song "About a Girl"-- ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second. The bonus live performance included here (recorded in 1990 at Portland's Pine Street Theater) suggests as much, mostly ignoring Bleach's side B to showcase important transitional tracks: the scabrous pop of "Sappy" (later to emerge as "Verse Chorus Verse" on the 1993 No Alternativecompilation); "Dive", a blueprint for Nevermind's plutonium-grade rockers; and "Been a Son", which bears the influence of Cobain's beloved Vaselines (whose "Molly's Lips" is covered here). It's a testament to both Endino's live-in-the-room production style and Nirvana's raucous onstage energy that Bleach and the bonus concert set sound like they were cut in the same session. But the concert also presents Nirvana in a light that the band's subsequently troubled and tragic story so rarely affords them: a simple, playful power trio who could lay waste to a drunk club crowd on a Saturday night”.
I am going to end with a feature from NME. Back in 2015, they argued why Nirvana’s amazing debut album should not be confined to the shelf. How it should be celebrated and discussed more. As it is turns thirty-five on 15th June, I hope new focus comes its way. I think it does have a couple of filler tracks, though they somehow add to its charm and scrappiness. What you get from Bleach is a band not yet fully formed, and yet you can feel those seeds of genius. The sheer promise and originality. How they would go on not only to influence so many artists coming through. They would write their name in the music history book:
“Bleach’, released over 27 years ago on June 15, 1989, isn’t Nirvana’s unwanted child, but it still has to fight damn hard for elbow room in Nirvana’s legacy. Between the world-changing ‘Nevermind’, the harrowingly raw ‘In Utero’ and the swansong vulnerability of ‘MTV Unplugged’, there’s scant room in the legend for a debut LP that was still too indebted to Seattle’s murky grunge sound to be deemed a bona-fide classic. It didn’t change pop culture forever, but instead only sold 40,000 copies in the US until the release of ‘Nevermind’. Rather than exploring a rock star’s struggles with fame, pressure, self-loathing and drug addiction, it was the voice of a grouchy slacker.
Yet ‘Bleach’ is far too important to be cast aside as the runt of the litter – because here, for all the flaws and foibles, were the first flickering signs that Nirvana would become something special. ‘School’ looms into life on a wave of murky feedback and then erupts in a rudimentary-yet-blistering riff: sonically and lyrically it’s as simple as they come, but there’s something about that scabrous bellyaching that perfectly sums up a desire to kick against the pricks and their bitchy, adolescent cliques.
Likewise, the helter-skelter racket of ‘Mr Moustache’ takes aim at dim-witted alpha males and their macho posturing as Kurt yelps witheringly: “Yes I eat cow/I am not proud.” Later, he’d claim that he wrote all of the album’s lyrics in one evening and they didn’t carry any great weight of meaning, but he was already capable of vocalising how it felt to be discontent and disenchanted. ‘Bleach’ married scratchy, irascible noise to the most adolescent of concerns – school, bullies and, on ‘Scoff’ as on ‘Been A Son’, parental strife – and made them feel like the most important issues in the world. As Nirvana grew in stature, so Cobain’s bugbears became more complex, too, but he’d never lose the knack for lending a voice to everyone who was similarly pissed-off, for understanding his audience in a way that Axl Rose, Eddie Vedder et al never could.
And if ‘In Utero’ is often hailed as the purist’s Nirvana album with its bleak, unvarnished sound, it’s worth remembering that it was purposefully abrasive, a discontented troublemaker thumbing its nose at everyone who now wanted a piece of it. ‘Bleach’ is violently raw because it couldn’t be anything else: recorded for just $600 and in 30 hours, there’s no play-acting in the rough, guttural ‘Negative Creep’ or the narky thrash of ‘Blew’. Even the lead single ‘Love Buzz’, a cover of the Dutch band Shocking Blue, is a weird and warped little thing, a far more ambitious, tongue-in-cheek and playful record than anything Mudhoney or Soundgarden were mustering at the time. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine any of their contemporaries being capable of something like ‘About A Girl’. Kurt’s first true masterpiece, the fuzzy and deceptively sweet melodies and none-more-simple structure undercut by the lyrical tangle of dependence, debt, conflict and lust – an unconventional treatment of a love song that’d crop up in ‘Heart Shaped-Box’, too – and showed Nirvana’s soft underbelly could be just as arresting as their ear-splitting thrashes”.
On 15th June, it is thirty-five years since Nirvana’s Bleach was released. How many people who bought the album that day realised it would be one of the first big steps from a band who would change music?! Astonishing songs like About a Girl and Negative Creep showcase how peerless the band were. This incredible album is worthy of more love than it got in 1989. It has been reappraised but, still, it is underrated. Let’s hope that it gets full respect and acknowledgement…
FOR its thirty-fifth anniversary.