Time To Let The Tributes In: A review of SPIN's Newermind

Click here to download the album.

What does a tribute album hope to achieve?

If the participating artists stay faithful to the music they are paying homage to, we’ll pass the album off as boring; a bad ripoff.

If they strip the originals down to the bone and build them back up in a new way, we’ll declare the attempts heretical, disrespectful, maybe even a bad case of “trying too hard.”

Nirvana is one of those bands that, as horrible as this may sound, benefited, and benefits, from having ended quickly--a shooting star of sound. When you stop and really take a hard look at their catalog of music--basically four albums--they’ve got:

1. Bleach, the typical Indie Label release that showed glimmers of future successesm, but was still mostly raw.

2. Incesticide, the stop-gap B-Sides collection.

3. In Utero, the sometimes-underrated, sometimes classic album where they finally realized what it is they wanted to accomplish (technically their sophomore release, no less).

4. And of course, the big guy, the crossover success, the coming-out party.

I was born in 1984. Nevermind came out in 1991. I won’t even pretend to be a part of the late teen/twenty-something crowd that claims emotional ownership of the “time and place” that is attached to Nevermind. I had no idea about it (Nevermind, that is), didn’t know it existed,had never even mistakenly seen a Nirvana video on MTV. In 1991, I still thought Bryan Adams was a badass, Billy Joel was high art, and to be honest, I’m not even sure my parents had cable TV yet.

I don’t even remember how I came to hear Nirvana for the first time. I’m pretty sure it was my friend Kenny in the 6th grade, (you should check out his band Gameday Regulars. Their debut EP is extremely good.) who had the infamous “Drunken Smiley Face” Nirvana t-shirt that I was always too scared to ask my parents to buy me, because of this graphic on the back:

I eventually settled for this much-tamer t-shirt:

To put it bluntly, and for the sake of brevity, Nevermind literally changed my life, saved my life, had that effect on me that people often claim music can have. It did. I swear. I’ve listened to Nevermind, I would guess, a few hundred times in my life. Really. I know every scream, every word, every note. I know all the trivia behind it, all the inside jokes, everything. In Utero is my favorite Nirvana album, and if I had to rank them, I might even put Unplugged in New York at number two, but that’s only because Nevermind is just--on a different level.

It’s not their best record. The mixing is too slick, too radio-friendly. All the lines I thought were so ingenious, so insightful, I now know to be word mashups from poetry books, picked because they fit a melody and a theme and a tone. But every time I hear it, or even just a song from it, I’m instantly reverted back to a time and a place, one of the ultimate goals, one would believe, of great art.

So when I saw that SPIN had put Newermind together, featuring thirteen artists, the majority of which I’m not even familiar with, to cover these classic songs (again, classic not because they are the best songs ever, or even the best Nirvana songs ever, but because they are a part of something bigger), I thought:

Well, this will probably be awful.

Which is the SOP response for fans like me. Honestly, he only reason I even gave it a try is because I saw that somehow, SPIN had convinced the Meat Puppets to get involved, and that they were the ones going after “The Hit.”

Before writing this, I listened to Newermind several times--a couple of casual listens, one in-depth at home, and once while I wrote this piece, but none of the listens affected me as much as when I listened while I drove home from work, during my new commute, back to my new house, 26 years-old, soon to be 27. I couldn’t help but think about Nevermind and who I was when I first started listening to it. It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, but when I do the math, I realize--that was 15 years ago.

It’s old. I’m old. Everything in my life, and the world, has changed.

Maybe it’s time to let the tributes in.

Smells Like Teen Spirit
Performed by Meat Puppets

This was a really smart move. I’m sure the list of bands who would even want to cover one of the biggest songs of the last 30 years is short, let alone be able to pull it off, and the Meat Puppets do. It’s a fairly straightforward verison of the original, with just enough hey-we’re-doing-it-our-way spirit to accept it as worthy. The vocal strain evident in the beginning of each line of the chorus highlights just how “produced” the original was.

In Bloom
Performed by Butch Walker & The Black Widows

This is, by far, the track that most fully captures why tribute albums can be a good thing. It reminds me of a moment on some random season of Top Chef, when Grant Achatz was a judge, and the contestants had to make a dish in his style--a molecular gastronomy/playfulness/de-and-re-construction of a classic dish. One of the dishes chosen was the humble s’more. I don’t remember how whatever TC hopeful botched it, but Achatz’s breakdown of why it didn’t work was classic, something to the effect of, “Look, the whole point is to isolate the individual sensations of the s’more--the elements, beyond the ingredients, that make it A S’more. And there are three--crunchy graham cracker, melted chocolate, and burnt sugar. The rest is up to you.”

This version of In Bloom is a complete re-imagining--on the surface, it’s completely different--but the main elements are still there. I love it.

Come As You Are
Performed by Midnight Juggernauts

It’s crazy--in the first three tracks of the album, we’ve got a complete range of emotions. I’m not familiar with Midnight Juggernauts, but their decision to take a classic song, and just push it through the filter of “their” music, was a poor one. Where’s the burnt sugar? Where’s the melted chocolate? There might as well have never been an original.

Breed
Performed by Titus Andronicus

What a lot of the covers on Newermind wound up doing for me was highlighting just how good the original was. Breed is a good song--not a great one. It’s energy is the highlight, and while there’s no doubt that TA has energy, it’s just--not the same. Their lo-fi feel should pair well with Nirvana’s aesthetic, but it just winds up feeling like a rip-off, even when it’s obvious that that wasn’t the intention.

Lithium
Performed by The Vaselines

The Vaselines are another group that pops up frequently in Nirvana folklore, so it’s pretty cool that they were involved with this project. As somebody who took the leap and explored their music beyond Nirvana’s cover of Molly’s Lips, I agree fully with their (or SPIN’s?) decision to take a shot at Lithium. And it’s a success. The only way I can describe it is like some bizarro fucked-up hipster church (No, really, they exist) sermon. The plodding bass line puts even more of an emphasis on one of the better lyrical efforts on Nevermind.

Polly
Performed by Amanda Palmer

*Donning my best Aziz Ansari impersonation* If you were like, Joe, what song on a Nirvana Nevermind Tribute album would they choose to do a whisper-acoustic version of, what song would you guess, then I’d totally be like, Polly!

The banjos save this effort from its obviousness. This was a tough undertaking, as even the most cursory of Nirvana fans have already heard Nirvana do this song about three different ways.

Territorial Pissings
Performed by Surfer Blood

This is the song where you realize that Dave Grohl knows what he's doing behind the drums. The first drum roll into the chorus is really, really bad. Like, laughably bad.

Besides that, the vocals are downy soft, in a song that needs to be backed--fueled, even--by anguish, and the feedback sounds like a pre-programmed sample.

Drain You
Performed by Foxy Shazam

Drain You might be my favorite Nevermind track, so this is a tricky maneuver. No cover of it is ever going to feel “good.” That being said, the best way to go about it is probably to just go in the complete opposite direction, which is what Foxy Shazam does. The choruses work more than the verses, and the breakdown before the final chorus is missing the sonic brilliance of the original, but it’s not--terrible.

I guess.

Lounge Act
Performed by Jessica Lea Mayfield

This is an underappreciated track on the original album. The lyrics are rivaled only by “The Hit” in the random-poetry-book-couplet category. I’d even argue that the chorus is better. The harmonizing, combined with the tempo change, in the chorus was a great idea. Plus, who doesn’t love shimmery backing guitar stabs?

Stay Away
Performed by Charles Bradley & The Menahan Street Band

Yeah, well, this happened.

At least I know what the actual lyrics are now.

On A Plain
Performed by Telekinesis

Now this is a proper lo-fi cover. Intentionally shitty guitar tones. That papier-mâché drum kick feel. Perfect rendition of the chorus. I can almost see Telekinesis intentionally giving a shit about not giving a shit.

Something In The Way
Performed by JEFF The Brotherhood

I've always loved--loved--SITW, ever since reading the quote in the Michael Azzerad book that, when writing the song, KC wanted to capture “living under a bridge, dying of AIDS.”

Has there ever been more of a Seattle-in-the-early-90’s statement?

Besides the fact that there’s literally two guitar chords involved, and the “Something/In the way” bit is an unabashed ripoff of The Beatles “Something," I still love this song and always will, and in this instance, JEFF the Brotherhood just squats over it, grunts, and takes a massive shit on it. Even their blurb about it from the SPIN web page is douchey:

"The idea was to take the least heavy song on Nirvana's least heavy album and give it the JEFF treatment -- make it real doomy. That's all we know how to do!" says guitarist Jake Orrall, who, with his drummer brother Jamin, make up the Nashville duo.

Oh--the JEFF treatment.

Of course.

Endless Nameless
Performed by EMA

I go back and forth on this, SPIN’s decision to cover the “secret” track, which, future trivia answer here--my copy of Nevermind does not have. I’ve read that the initial pressing did not contain the track, but there’s no way in hell my copy is from the original pressing. Unless it is. In which case, I probably should have taken better care of it.

Anyway, as of writing this, I still kind of think it’s lame. I mean, it’s a noise jam. A joke. The fact that you wait out a sustained period of silence just to hear detuned guitars and feedback is the punch line, so to give it this treatment, like it’s part of the artifact--it comes off looking like SPIN is trying too hard (told you that would come up eventually).

I know--maybe they should have given it the JEFF treatment.

--

So, for the Nirvana fans out there, old and new, give Newermind a listen.

I mean, it's free.

And even if you hate it, it will make you want to throw on Nevermind (throw on--a reference to vinyl--probably not the best way to end this moving-forward-regarding-my-past piece), and if you’re anything like me, you'll wind up back in a time and a place that, no matter how you got there, will always be worth the visit.