Nirvana ‎– With The Lights Out

There are eight previously unreleased / rare original Nirvana songs here that are worth listening to, mostly on CD2: five that are really good ('Verse Chorus Verse', 'Old Age', 'D-7', 'Oh The Guilt', 'Sappy') and three that are average ('Opinion', Return Of The Rat', 'Do Re Mi'). The solo acoustic cover of 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night' is also worth hearing, as Kurt plays a more minor chord at the end of the second line to make it sound more mournful than the 'Unplugged In New York' version.

However, the remaining 53 audio tracks, mostly on CDs 1 and 3, are either weak demos that never made it (you can hear the roots of 'Swap Meet' in 'Mrs. Buttersworth'), poor quality covers, previously released B-sides, or demo / live versions of stuff you can find in similar or far better musical form on other official releases.↓↓↓ Continued below ↓↓↓

The DVD contains live recordings of often poor sound quality that do not add anything to Nirvana's musical legacy. Much better live Nirvana could already be found on 'Live Tonight, Sold Out', 'From the Muddy Banks of the Wiskaw', and a few B-sides; the subsequently released 'Live At Reading' is also far better.

The booklet rescues the boxset to a certain extent, providing an illustrated background to the 3 CDs, personal recollections of the band from Thurston Moore, and a very loosely-related but well-written guitar music history lesson by Neil Strauss that ends with Nirvana as kings of the 'fourth wave of punk'.

In summary, I would say this boxset is for Nirvana obsessives only, who will listen to it a few times before archiving it away happy in the knowledge that they have heard everything the band ever did (until the next boxset comes out). However, try to get this for under ten quid, as there is way too much filler here to justify paying more.