Nirvana as Close to You

Within a matter of months after Kurt Cobain's suicide in April of 1994, fans started asking for the official release of all the demos, stray songs, alternate takes, and rarities in Nirvana's vaults. Due to various legal disputes between the surviving bandmembers and the Cobain estate, this long-awaited set of unreleased material did not appear until late 2004, when the three-disc, one-DVD box With the Lights Out finally appeared…

As persistency goes, one must give credit where it is due to the Vitamin imprint. Their rigorous schedule of releases assures the public that there will be, at bare minimum, one to two releases per month paying homage to a current pop icon or legendary rock figure. With this installment, the label looks to honor one of grunge's most revered albums, if not the most revered album of the era: Nirvana's Nevermind. Stripped of the brutal percussion work, the squelching fierce attack of Kurt Cobain's guitar mastery and his trademark screams, the quartet find and emphasize layer after layer within the simplicity of Cobain's melodies and song arrangements. While some songs don't transfer over well in the process, others work quite nicely. While most people can easily dismiss this as a novelty (and to a degree, it is), there are interesting aspects to this album that the die-hard Nirvana fan will find intriguing and enjoyable.

Nirvana formed in 1987. Considered by many to be the leading lights of the Seattle grunge scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and perhaps the most influential rock band of Generations X & Y, Nirvana was a powerful trio of musicians who brought a unique aesthetic to a growing-stale rock scene…

20th Anniversary Edition. 90 page special collector's book - unreleased photos and exclusive memorabilia. 70 total tracks - 35 unreleased. Nevermind was never meant to change the world, but you can never predict when the Zeitgeist will hit, and Nirvana's second album turned out to be the place where alternative rock crashed into the mainstream. This wasn't entirely an accident, either, since Nirvana did sign with a major label, and they did release a record with a shiny surface, no matter how humongous the guitars sounded. And, yes, Nevermind is probably a little shinier than it should be, positively glistening with echo and fuzzbox distortion, especially when compared with the black-and-white murk of Bleach.