Nirvana’s “In Utero” pays tribute to Cobain’s final months

I’m pretty sure I reviewed “Nevermind” around that album’s 20th anniversary. Its follow up, “In Utero,” also turns 20 this year. It was recorded in February of 1993, with its first single “Heart Shaped Box” dropping in August and the album coming out September. May is somewhere in between all of those months, so I figured now is the perfect time to talk about it. Every Nirvana album has its own strengths that keep me coming back. Most of Nirvana’s recorded material never made it onto any album—stuff you can find compilations like “With the Lights Out” or “Sliver: The Best of the Box.” There’s a ton of studio outtakes, songs played only live and songs Cobain recorded on cassette tapes found among his possession after his passing. A lot of Nirvana’s best songs are non-album tracks, like “Sappy” or “You Know You’re Right,” which can only be found on various box sets, compilations and download links on Nirvana fan pages. While you get a lot of great songs amongst these non-album tracks, you do miss out on one of Cobain’s other big skills—compiling a tracklist. It’s a lot easier to write a bunch of songs than it is to put them together as a cohesive project, but coming up with a definitive artistic statement in the form of a well-crafted album tends to give each song a kind of context and direction that makes it better than it would be on it’s own. All of Nirvana’s studio albums have that kind of artistic vision, but I think the vision behind “In Utero” might be the boldest and most exciting out of the three. There’s a quote from Kurt Cobain about “In Utero” and how he wanted the songs to be more extreme. The tracks on “Nevermind” reach a sort of balance between accessibility and abrasion. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is quite a spirited song, to say the least. There’s a lot of aggression there, but it’s also incredibly catchy. Same with “Come As You Are” and “Lithium.” There’s a happy medium that’s been reached. On “In Utero,” the goal is to do the opposite. “Dumb” might be one of Nirvana’s least-punk tracks, while “Heart Shaped Box” could have done well on rock radio in any year. Then you have the exact opposite end of the spectrum with “Tourette’s” or “Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter,” having essentially no commercial appeal and existing only to hardcore fans of alternative music. It’s this whiplash back and forth that makes for such an exciting and dynamic track list on “In Utero.” The production is the other big key. “Nevermind” has a really warm, inviting production that helps to make the punk aggression more palatable. That’s not what the band did for “In Utero.” The band recorded the album in our very own home state of Minnesota at Pachyderm Studios, and they hired Steve Albini to do it. Albini is one of those famous names in the alternative scene who is really good at making stuff that’s hard to listen to, but in a good way. He’s great at capturing aggressive, distorted and abrasive sounds. He’s both played and recorded a lot of classics. Nirvana stated in interviews around the time they wanted to get rid of their nonpunk fans with “In Utero,” and Steve Albini was just the man to help them do it. Pachyderm Studios also seems to be Albini’s regular stomping grounds—a lot of his work was done in that studio around that time. Albini’s work would later be remixed at the behest of the record label to make it more appealing, but his original mix has since been released. Decide for yourself which one you prefer, but either way I think Albini did a good job setting the tone for this record in terms of its timbre. Even the poppier tracks have a foreboding dissonance to them. The abrasion doesn’t just come from the production, though. Cobain’s guitar playing is another big factor. There’s a ton of harmonics and random stray notes that set “In Utero’s” playing apart from “Nevermind’s” mass-appeal riffs. Cobain was always a sloppy guitar player—somewhat intentional— which produced a unique sound all his own. Here, he really turned it up to 11. If you want to know what makes Kurt Cobain such a memorable guitar player, this is the album to look to. The last thing that makes this album so special to me is just the emotion behind it. Cobain died in April 1994—only a few months after “In Utero’s” release. You can hear a lot of pain and frustration in the music and, when you have that context, it makes sense. This album feels like a cry for help. Micheal Stipe, REM frontman and friend of Cobain, says he had been talking to Kurt about working together on a fourth album before his suicide. The idea was to make something more acoustic and less aggressive. Maybe that album would have let us see a different side of Cobain—one more at ease with himself and the world around him. However, Cobain never found that peace and we never got that album. Instead, the last big artistic statement from him is this brilliant inferno of emotion.