in utero poll

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.

I really can't imagine Cobain at 50.

Re the Litt production, my understanding was that he rerecorded the vocals and mixed, but the instrumentation is from the Albini session. And there was that German vinyl pressing which has the Albini versions, or am I making that up? I seem to remember they weren't even terribly different.

Litt remixed/polished up a couple of tracks but that was about it.

I definitely think the Albini versions of HSB and All Apologies have surfaced somewhere

What happened to Scott Litt, anyway? I remember he did that Green Day album, but seems like he's been more low profile as a producer since he finished working with R.E.M.

xp the albini versions are on the 20th anniversary disc 1, after the b-sides

their worst show ever according to everyone but kurt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWDU8OE_mBU

much of this not widely circulated until semi-recently... I've only ever listened to the unbelievably fucked up version of School at the beginning of the set. god he is such a mess. and then they start jamming... it rules. they're so bad

"Scentless Apprentice" for me, still.

having great drumming from Grohl really amplifies it too, like the shift in the drumming pattern after the ascending single note riff.

plus that single note riff seems like it's wanting to be a violin on electric guitar.

I'm only on a Nirvana kick lately as last week, at an outdoor beer festival, a stoner band randomly covered "I Hate Myself and Want to Die". pleasant surprise that.

"Scentless Apprentice" is my favourite Nirvana song

the live version on Muddy Banks of the Wishkah is pretty incredible too

"Milk It" also deserves plenty of praise. god that riff.

also you could like, do a 60s dance to the chorus

The #1 is an odd choice

i do love it though. but it definitely isn't the peak of the album.

such a great opening line tho

yup. I'd put it as my #3 i think

Very Ape is maybe my favourite song of theirs but it doesn't seem to get much love

Tanya Tagaq's is the only version of Rape Me I need and I tend to skip it on this

that hypothetical next nirvana album with all the strings and shit - would it have been more stuff like all apologies or unplugged? would it have been more americana? baroque pop? chamber grunge? it's hard to imagine something radically different from what we have but who knows

Always shocked when Cobain stifles a giggle at the final chorus of "Milk It", like a cartoon scribbled in the margins of a suicide note.

That giggle is one of my fav bits in any of their songs

hmmmmTEHH MEEEEEE

Anyway ask me 10 years ago I'd have said Pennyroyal Tea was my favourite on In Utero and now it's my least favourite (still very good). I don't think it's because I've worn it out either I just prefer the 11 others now (or 12 others - Gallons still retains its novelty somehow)

I’d loftily dismissed Nirvana as a populist Pixies ripoff and tried to ignore them, but then this record came out and I was slapped across the face by how great they truly were. “Milk It” was the track that did it. Very few songs match its electricity.

xp Where does it say they wanted to do an album with strings?

I think the only evidence of the direction of the next album were "You Know You're Right" and "Do Re Mi," which sounds to me like some of it would have been their poppiest stuff.

The first lyric of this LP was paraphrased, nicely, as the first line of SPIN Magazine’s review of Green Day’s Nimrod.

And it’s a fantastic way to start In Utero.

XP Courtney Love (or maybe Grohl) said Kurt was really into Automatic For The People and wanted to move in that direction.

The author was Jesse something

https://www.spin.com/2017/04/green-day-nimrod-review/

They'd have been better leaving that remark for (the very good but noticeably more adult-sounding) Warning

I don’t think Serve the Servants is an odd pick at all. Has one of the most iconic first lines of an album ever and lets you know that the entirety of the album In Utero is ahead of you.

But for real the ramshackle charm of it is undeniable, an amazing first statement post Nervermind, I probably voted for it.