Nirvana - In Utero

Probably Nirvana's finest achievement. It's much less glitzy sounding than Nevermind was - and could have been even less so as Steve Albini's original, rougher sounding recordings were remixed by Scott Litt of REM (production) fame. It'd be wonderful to hear these original recordings as a re-release (like the Beatles did with Let it be [Naked]). It'll probably never happen - but that's major labels for you. According to Kurt's diaries, the original idea was to release the Albini version on vinyl and 8-track(!) only through Touch and Go recordings, and the radio friendly version on CD through Geffen. Nice idea but i'm sure Geffen didn't fancy licensing one of their biggest selling artists ever to some trendy label just so the cool kids could have the Albini version on vinyl. You never know though - they've already released about as many rarities as they can in the With The Lights Out box set, sure they'll try and milk the legacy a bit more in the next few years...

Rumoured to be have originally been titled 'I Hate Myself and I Want To Die', In Utero was a marked improvement on the previous 2 albums, Bleach and Nevermind, and offered glimpse of what might have been had things not turned out the way they did.
This album would be my recommended start point for anyone not familiar with Nirvana.
Hard, fast, energetic for the most part but with tracks that showed another side to the band, a side highlighted on the excellent 'Unplugged in New York' album.
The fact that there's a 15 to 20 minute gap of silence between tracks 12 and 13, is made less tedious to skip through by the quality of the track thats hidden, a real gem surpassed on the album by only a handful of tracks, including the sublime All Apologies, the almost balladic Heart Shaped Box and the superbly aggressive Scentless Apprentice, one of my favourite tracks ever by any artist, any genre.

"I lie in the the soil and fertilize mushrooms,
Leaking out gas fumes made into perfume"

RIP and thanks.

This is one interesting artefact of grunge era. It wasn't recieved as well as Nevermind, but in retrospect its a certain improvement over their breakout album. Nevermind, in my opinion, suffered from some being a little bit samey, whereas In Utero, as said by Cobain himself, is more varied and better recorded album. It is also scary and quite punishing in many places - as if though Cobain cut open his head for anyone to see. In fact, one of the songs (Tourette's) is blindingly fast and no wonder that it was later covered (not sure whether it was serious or ironic version) by death metal band Impaled.