in utero poll

oh boy, that riff that kicks in briefly on Frances Farmer at 0:38. it's not an overused sound on the album, so when it appears it's all the sweeter.

scentless apprentice is the way I enjoyed them sounding

that was my favourite song when the album came out. i've gone off it a bit over the years.

oh boy, that riff that kicks in briefly on Frances Farmer at 0:38.

And the instrumental middle eight!

this record is pretty riffless for such a big rock album hit

Anyone surprised that Tourette's earned 3 votes is missing out on how misanthropic, evil, and pummeling this band could be. That said, my pick is Frances Farmer for life.

love this album, especially "frances farmer." "milk it" is still the scariest nirvana performance.

"all apologies" has always sounded like a lennon homage to me, the tune reminds me a lot of "look at me" and "julia."

yeah these verses esp.

I am my own parasite
I don't need a host to live
We feed off of each other
We can share our endorphins

Doll steak!
Test meat!

...

I own my own pet virus
I get to pet and name her
Her milk is my shit
My shit it is her milk

i wonder if this was the earliest song i encountered where there was something uncanny to the lyrics that wasn't sung just as a pose or for the effect of weirdness or artiness, but had some kind of strange conviction to it.

His lyrics are not often praised. Or is that a misconception on my part?

the way kurt sings, i rarely know what he's actually saying so seeing the words to milk it written down like that is kind of mindblowing.

the moment that's grown on me most in recent years is just the way serve the servants opens - just this huge, confrontational squall of sound.

is missing out on how misanthropic, evil, and pummeling this band could be.

Yeah, they're often misunderstood as much more one dimensional than they really were. Doesn't help that their most famous album is also their most boring.

this one and unplugged are the only nirvana i ever feel like listening to

nevermind is super boring and the sound of that record is terrible imo

milk it would've been my vote

‘There’s a musician in the band now!

this record is pretty riffless for such a big rock album hit

― j., Thursday, March 19, 2015 9:15 PM

what

like, try to sing the riffs to the songs, from memory

DUN-DUN-DUN-NUN DUN-NUN-NUN-NUN-NUN-DUN-DUN

yeah they're pretty much all like that

i started typing them all out
but i got bored
i can hum them all
the pretty songs are pretty
the heavy songs fucking stomp
i remember them all

you don't know what you're remembering

Tons of memorable riffs on this album.

Ha, I could tell right away that flappy bird was talking about "Scentless Apprentice". That one and "All Apologies" are the ones I really think of as being based on memorable riffs in the classic sense.

Milk it's as memorable as riffs get imo.

almost the entire album is memorable riffs wtf

The only songs that aren't riffy are Dumb and Pennyroyal Tea.

I think you guys are right, actually. Even the noisier songs like "Very Ape" and "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" have solid riffs.

sund4r

songs like "serve the Servants" aren't riffy but "Milk It", "Scentless Apprentice" and "Heart Shaped Box" have memorable riffs, even if they're simple and whatnot.

Serve the Servants has a really catchy riff!

I remember it more for its chorus (though the song is one of my favs on the album)

Dow-nah-now-nah-now-now dow-nah-now-nah-now-now dan-DOW! dan-DOW!

but yeah the idea that there's not riffs on this album is kinda o_O

every song on this has a memorable riff wtf

I remember posting itt years ago saying this was an overrated album but i completely reversed course on that a few years ago. it was my go to for a while, esp when the reissue came out

It will always be my fave by my fave band

I know j. likes this album as much as I do. I think that maybe his point is that the hooks that come most immediately to mind for a lot of these songs like "Serve the Servants" and "Frances Farmer" are something other than an iconic heavy guitar riff. Tbf, though, this is probably true of a lot of classic heavy rock records. Not every Deep Purple song was "Smoke on the Water".

like who in the world could listen to Very Ape and say that's not a good riff?

The only songs that aren't riffy are Dumb and Pennyroyal Tea.

― chap, Sunday, February 19, 2017 4:08 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Basically, yeah. With 'Dumb' I think of the cello part first.

The Prodigy obviously thought 'Very Ape' was a good riff - they sampled it for 'Voodoo People'

yes my point was about the character of the guitar parts more than their presence. i associate 'riffs' with a certain combination of sinuousness, chunkiness, and independence from the other parts (though obviously in a very riffy song where the guitar determines the rhythm section +/- rhythm guitar, the riff would only be independent in virtue of being 'in charge' of the overall effect the song presents). in general cobain's parts have kind of a sawtoothy invertedness to them, they're turned in on themselves, maybe overall a lack of vertical displacement in them that is emphasized by the way he tends to repeat them monotonously to form larger structures (often the repeat shows up because the riff just ascends ascends ascends straightforwardly, then starts over, that kind of thing). but novoselic also doubles those parts a lot, carrying them through under verses and such even after cobain has dropped out or moved on to noodling or noise-generation or a little complementary arpeggiating, so that the effect is sort of that it's never fully cobain who's playing the 'riff', it's a unison effort that picks up this or that texture or volume in passing. the same applies to the additional guitar parts he laid down, which are often variants on the original/core part that's already being shared with novoselic. so it's like there's one melodic idea that's been distributed out to the different players (multitracked players) with their different characters (more emphasis on rhythm-guitar-esque aspects, more emphasis on lead aspects, more noise, more drive, etc.) that makes the whole thing much fuller-bodied, more textured, but the motion of the idea is very counter-riffy in many respects because it never 'goes anywhere' (to the extent that it moves it often seems mainly on/off, up/down) and is repeated ad nauseam.

i had probably been listening to the live records of the period at the time i posted above, i.e., when they had pat smear playing, and i think those just accentuate the underlying effect, because no one really does much different than on the studio album, and smear and cobain tend to each cover pre-existent parts from the studio album, so each one is simultaneously a bit more independent-sounding but thereby more appreciably a copy/variant of the core idea.

i think of it as a testament to the band's group writing combined with the peculiarity of cobain's melodic sense. take a part in isolation and it often seems dumb and aggressively unmusical, but in concert they have an opposite effect.

their man who sold the world cover seems instructive in that regard because apart from the lead, they're left to more conventional rock-writing/arranging business when playing under the verses, in which you can still hear their tendencies as bass/rhythm players, and the long ascending bit which seems a bit nirvana-y in its way of solving the problem of getting somewhere - but really the lead that opens the song seems most nirvana-ish, except what it shows you is that a nirvana song would be just that, repeated over and over, played by everyone in the band w/ variations as described above.

I feel liek "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" could have fit on this album

xp compare to everlong, which is, like, a perfect song, but utterly modern-rock conventional, with at least two identifiable motifs (the da-da-dadadada and the soaring bit that complements the vocal line, the former of which keys you immediately to expect it once you know the song, so that the first few notes are enough to awaken the anticipation for it) that get elaborated through a dramatic dynamic rather than one where all the parts are meted out simultaneously. i suppose what i have in mind then is that to some extent a classic type of rock riff has a context in which there's more dramatic motivic development (even if within the confines of rock song structures, harmonies, etc.), and nirvana songs typically forego a lot of the structuring techniques that would highlight their components as 'riffs' instead of as just the cores of the songs that are repeated with variation. which is what i meant about singing/remembering - a more 'riffy' part that you could sing or play by itself would call to mind much of the shape and motion of the song it came from, but nirvana parts feel more like they don't or can't lead you back to the whole song in that way, because what the whole song is, is not a development of that material, but a repetition of it. sing or play one of those by itself and what you would find instead is an image of the record with a lot just vanished.

another way to put that might be that certain kinds of classic guitar riffs have a strongly gestural quality to them - what can be enigmatic and attractive about them is often how they twist around and seem to 'say something' whose meaning recedes as they're repeated (only to come back again). cobain's parts have a more fretful/obsessive character that when repeated makes their effect seem less like a gesture and more like a whole person is turned uneasily inward - so there's not a communicative, outward motion in the moving musical parts so much as there's a sustained, relatively thwarted agitation that you could register as if 'from outside' (or from within it, depending on how the music leads you to identify with it). the analogous motion is more like worrying at a fray or picking at a sore than it is gesturing to someone.

that would also fit with the way their 'pretty' songs approximate mantras

i always loved the (probably apocryphal) story that thurston moore told in the liner notes to the 2004 boxset. he was hanging out with dave and maybe krist right after they finished in utero, and they played a cassette of the rough mixes for him. the album opened with "moist vagina," and of course thruston totally flipped and thought it was like, the punkest thing ever. lol. great fucking song though. i like the sequencing fine on in utero, i think adding any more noise or heavy songs would throw it all out of whack.

Idk I wouldve loved to see Hate Myself and VCV/Sappy in the tracklisting

That said, there's a weird sort of structure to the album pacing, where the band offers two rawer tracks before coming out with a big 'pop/rock' moment (usu. ballads, though not in the case of Heart Shaped Box, which is not demonstrably more 'pop' than say, Servants or Rape Me except for the S Litt production). So you have Servants and Scentless Apprentice, followed by HSB. Then you have Rape Me and F Farmer, followed by Dumb, and so on.

I guess what I'm saying is there probably is room for maybe MV/Hate Myself, followed by VCV, but I do run into flappy's problem about where that sequence would fit exactly

^^The B-Sides/Outtakes would have made for a killer follow-up stopgap EP, as was the style at the time.

Also: Kurt would have been 50 today.