Nirvana – Bleach
Well, it had to happen eventually, right? Back when I was a teenager I had Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach, on CD. In fact, I had all three of their albums on CD, along with Unplugged in New York. If you were between the ages of 10 and 40 in the ’90s, you kind of had to have at least one or two Nirvana albums. They were one of the first bands that really mattered to me, and a gateway to harsher and heavier sounds—like I said in my posts about Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, grunge was how I came to love metal, and I loved Nirvana first.
But then I kinda stopped listening to Nirvana. It wasn’t my choice, really. Even if I didn’t listen to Nirvana at home or on my Discman, I’d hear them anyway. After Kurt Cobain’s death, their music became ubiquitous in ways few bands will ever experience. Every song on Nevermind will be played on mainstream rock radio at some point this week in whatever city you’re in. You can count on it. It got to be overkill, and well, I just needed a break from Nirvana.
But then sometime later I started to be reminded of some of the weirder, deeper cuts that I really liked, such as “Verse Chorus Verse” or “Aneurysm,” and I slowly thawed on the idea of listening to Nirvana again. And by fall 2021, faced with an inexpensive copy of Bleach at Richmond’s Deep Groove, I was compelled to buy it. Which led me on a year-long quest to pick up the complete Nirvana catalog on vinyl. (That sounds super dramatic, but honestly you can buy these albums everywhere. They’re at Target. Anyway, I bought them all and I’ll write about them all. I didn’t get Unplugged though.)
Bleach is not Nirvana’s best album, though I’m sure there’s a few folks out there who’d say it all went downhill after this. That seems pretty obviously incorrect, but hey, I’m not here to dictate taste. It is awesome though, more aligned with then-peers like Melvins and Mudhoney and Tad than the more polished Butch Vig sound of their next record. These are raw, dirty, ugly songs that occasionally have pop hooks (“About a Girl”), sludgy riffs (“Blew”) or noise rock screech (“Negative Creep”). Looking back, most of this record evaded overexposure because of that ugliness, which is a blessing. I’m pretty sure it’s still the best selling album on Sub Pop, because how could it not be? But The Postal Service gave it a run for its money, that’s for sure. I don’t have that one on vinyl, and if I’m being honest, I might have gotten burned out on those songs too. Talk to me in five years, though.
Rating: 9.2
Sound Quality: Great
Torche – Meanderthal
Recently I was having a discussion with some colleagues about whether “hipster metal” is still a thing. I’m not sure it is; back when Mastodon were blowing up in the mid-’00s and “post-metal” started to become a thing, indie listeners became a lot more metal curious, but it sort of peaked with Deafheaven’s Sunbather and has slowly waned since then, from what I can tell. At least in terms of it being a crossover trend. I’m not saying indie types don’t still listen to metal—you could make the argument that I’m one of them. (But the definition of “indie” is always in flux, it would seem.) It’s just that it doesn’t seem to have the critical fascination outside the usual channels that it once did.
Back during the ’00s though, that was the hipster metal heyday. Generally anything on Southern Lord or Hydra Head could be conceivably included in that, which is by no means an accusation or insult or anything of the kind. Just that once upon a time you’d see crossover between Belle and Sebastian and Boris shows. Maybe. Or maybe I was the only one? I definitely saw both bands in the same year once, I’m pretty sure. That said, I’m a fan of pretty much anything either label puts out, though Hydra Head has been kinda-sorta dormant since 2012. They put out a lot of my favorite metal records of the past couple decades though, including Botch’s We Are the Romans and this gem from Torche. It’s arguably as much grunge as metal, and songs like “Across the Shields” and “Healer” have as much Foo Fighters as Melvins in their sludgy roar. Again, that to me is a good thing. Not enough metal bands write anthems like these.
Because Hydra Head closed up shop, they don’t really reissue any of their old titles, and a lot of them have ended up being reissued by others—Botch by Sargent House, Cave In by Relapse and so on. Meanderthal was originally released on vinyl by Robotic Empire (Hydra Head did CD/digital) and because of that, there’s been a good number of pressings, though the last one was in 2013, which means this still isn’t super easy to find. That said, when we moved to Richmond, I happened upon the right Discogs seller at the right time, thus securing… not a White Whale, maybe a Cream Whale? An Ecru? Well, anyway, a great find, and it’s packaged super fun, if confusingly, too, with a sleeve that’s kind of like a pop-up book. Takes you a minute to figure out how to get the record out, but once you do, oh baby.
Rating: 9.2
Sound Quality: Great
Curtis Amy – Katanga!
I don’t actually know a whole lot about this record, other than that it’s part of a series of fancy Blue Note reissues of deep-cut jazz records from the archives with laminated artwork and all that. It sure does look snazzy! And that’s a cool as hell cover as well—honestly, I’m not sure record sleeves ever looked any better than they did in the late ’50s and early ’60s with Columbia and Blue Note jazz releases from S. Neil Fujita and Reid Miles and the like.
Despite the cover art, this is fairly standard hard bop jazz from the early ’60s, and it swings like hell. But some of the best moments are the ones that slow the tempo a bit, like the more nuanced, gorgeously layered “Native Land,” which makes the absolute most of its 10 minutes. As far as I know, today’s generations don’t really know this record that well—it has 333 ratings on RateYourMusic, which isn’t a whole lot. That said, it’s well worth the discovery.
Rating: 9.2
Sound Quality: Great
1000 Times Jeff 
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