Nirvana Album Recommendations: "Bleach"

Album Recommendations: Bleach

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Nirvana

[#] Bleach (1989)

Sludge monkeys.

Reviewed November 18, 2024

In 1988, a janitor and his weird tall bassist friend borrowed $600 and two drummers to record an album. The world was given Bleach the following year. It's always a little tricky with these baby photo records to divorce yourself of the crushing, crashing, atom-smashing force that Nirvana would become in its wake, but do your best. Bleach is a bleakly primordial hard rock album that features a deceptively dextrous guitarist (seriously, you try to sing and play "Mr. Moustache"'s main riff up to speed) with a caustic wail and an interest in pulling pop tunes out of its murky depths. Only a few underwritten mid-album cuts and some issues with its rhythm section keep Bleach from capturing Nirvana's full destructive capabilities.

Kurt's guitar abilities often get pegged as sloppy, but there's plenty of surprisingly inventive, even shreddy moments to make Bleach the guitar nerd's favorite Nirvana record. It's the mixture of "About a Girl"'s cute pop, "Negative Creep"'s shrieking rampages, and "Paper Cuts"' chilling depiction of child abuse that makes this record so uniquely crushing. Unfortunately, without Dave Grohl in the picture, Chad Channing provides most of the drums here; while not a bad drummer, Chad's a light hitter, and his beats and fills often lag the charge of the rest of the band, undermining the intensity. (The Melvins' Dale Crover is an understandably much tighter fit, though he's sadly only featured on four tracks.) Nirvana would go on to make better records, but they would never sound quite this leaden again.

(The original vinyl version of the album ends at "Sifting"; later CD issues would append "Big Cheese" and "Downer" to the tracklist. I consider these canon to the running order, for one thing because "Sifting" is only sort of a closer, but also because I just plain like "Big Cheese". Dem volume swells.)