Nirvana - Bleach

[ARC]

This may sound strange, but Bleach has always been my favourite Nirvana album.

It's so rough and raw, but the tunes are so catchy too!

I suppose a lot of it is nostalgia; it takes me back to being fifteen years old and discovering alternative rock for the first time.

I mean, seriously what a great record! Blew, Floyd the Barber, About a Girl, School, Love Buzz, Negative Creep, Scoff, Sifting - in fact there's not a single song on the record i don't STILL enjoy listening to (11 years after I first heard it)

The irony is Bleach cost $600 to make, I first heard it 11 years ago and I still listen to it daily on iTunes.

Chinese Democracy cost (insert ridiculous figure), I first heard that 4 months ago and I don't really listen to it at all anymore (save for the odd song). This is not an attack on Chinese Democracy, by the way. Just funny how some albums stay with you much longer than others...

[Lithium]

Great album, it's been my favourite by Nirvana at least 20 times. It's wonderfully raw and noise-rock inspired, but it also gave a taste of what was yet to come with "About a Girl".

[drtydane]

Fucking amazing album. Def my favorite. Released in what, 89?

[Forsaken]

Floyd the Barber is my favorite song on that album......

"Barney ties me to the chair

I can't see I'm really scared

Floyd breathes hard I hear a zip

Pee pee pressed against my lips"

[ARC]

Floyd the Barber is my favorite song on that album......

"Barney ties me to the chair

I can't see I'm really scared

Floyd breathes hard I hear a zip

Pee pee pressed against my lips"

Yeah, this album has fairly 'immature' lyrics. But Kurt was only about 21 at the time, I think. That's a great song though.

They should have put 'In Bloom' on this album; the earlier Sub Pop version was far superior to the Nevermind version IMO...

[sweetness]

way underrated album, the rawness gives me this awesomely erie feeling considering within a few years they'd take the world by storm, i dont know how to explain what im getting at

[inthisriver]

Definitely my favorite Nirvana album. Pretty much not a bad song on it, imo.

[appetite4illusions]

Can't say I'm a huge Nirvana fan, but I do find Bleach to be their most enjoyable album for me.

Fave's include: Negative Creep, Paper Cuts & About A Girl.

[dirtylenny]

Fucking incredible album...really dense kinda mudhoney motorcycle rev type guitar sound around some really hooky catchy shit, essentially really pop music thrown in the mud and kicked around for half an hour. Sounds fucking delicious though. Really forceful and i think part of that is the grasp of how the right tempo suits the right song.

About a Girl is fuckin cool, totally Beatley track. School stands out too, i think too, that fuckin riff man, makes me wanna pound through fuckin walls...worked so much better with Grohl on the kit too, if ever a track was made for being played live this was it...And that fuckin riff, amazing, simple, direct, brilliant.

Love Buzz too, fuckin brilliant, hypnotic ring around the rosie riff thats perfect for live performance, so much of Nirvanas stuff worked so incredibley better for live performance...not that these recordings dont cut the mustard cuz they fuckin rip it up.

Papercuts i love cuz its serious fuckin noise :) The way i like it. And the lyrics are fucking weird...cool...dark...odd images about submission and submissiveness. This is a running motif in Cobains writing i find...lots of his little lines and non-sequitars are always about submissiveness like..."hand down your umbilical noose so i can climb right back" etc and this whole fucking song is full of that shit...kinda base observational descriptions of weird fuckin submissive imagery...insanity and...i dunno, its definitely one of Cobains more interesting lyrical offerings, i mean check it out:

When I'm feeling tired. She puts food through the door.

I crawl towards the cursed light. Sometimes I can't find my way.

Newspapers spin' round. Soaking all that they can.

The cleaning is too kind. A good hosing down.

The lady whom I feel a maternal love for.

Cannot look me in the eyes.

But I see hers and they are blue.

And they cock and twist and masturbate.

I say so [x3]

Nirvana [x6]

Black windows a problem. I scratch with my nails.

I see others just like me. Why do they not try to escape.

But we're not the only ones. They point in my way.

They come with the flashing lights. And take my famliy away.

And very later I have learned to accept some friends of ridicule.

My whole existence is for your amusement.

And thatis why I'm here with you.

Don't take me away. I've found. Nirvana [x8]

Reminds me almost of the sort of shit William S Burroughs wrote...thematically i mean...its in that kinda vein...kinda like base sensory observations of like...submissiveness and captivity, deprivation. Polly is like that too i find, very much like that. Floyd the Barber too if you think about it.

I think cuz the rock/metal/heavy/meathead fuckin genre is full of like...gross out kinda shit this song is overlooked as being in that sort of vein but, i for one think theres a helluva lot more in there than that.

Negative Creep is brilliant too, snappy, a toe-tapper, again brilliant for live performance again with that kinda hypnotic thing that Love Buzz has. One lesson that Nirvana seemed REALLY aware of is that simplicity and repetition work....and if you do it right, if you're good at it, people will remember your shit til their death beds.

Scoff is brilliant too, again, that repeated riff and that repeated lyric, just a neat little song.

Kurt lyrics are incredibley interesting, not always in and of themselves but their effectiveness and the effectiveness in which he conveys them...i think Kurt spent his entire career as a lyricist kinda battling his own sarcasm. Like he had trouble writing without kinda making fun of it while he was doing it which i suppose you could say could be like a defence mechanism but i dont think so.

I dont think his lyrics were immature in this album, not in any negative sense, theres a sense of humor in most of Cobains lyrics but its very understated. Mr Moustache is a great example of this...where he seems to have these really kinda gentle needy ideals permeating through a song and he has to like...throw in "easy in an easy chair, poop as hard as rock" to kind of offset what could very well have been some kinda sincerely-meant stuff.

His lyrics are also very broad and non-specific a lot which is brilliant from a listeners perspective because it offers you so much ground for interpretation. Anyone looking for overtly profound "Momma put my guns in the ground" aint gonna find it outta old Kurt Donald but i am definitely a believer in the fact that Kurt Cobain was one of the best lyricists of all time, flat out...definitely up there with the best of them.

Theres so much awareness in his lyrics, he seems to like...be like constantly offsetting by which i mean....OK, as a performer, the way i see it, to some degree, no matter how self effacing you are, before you get up there, you gotta believe that you got something worth saying that people should listen too and thats not always an easy thing to reconcile with oneself i think, so you constantly get this thing of OK, the minute you think he's said something thats skirting around "a message" or sincerity or whatever he'll immediately make fun of it and theres something very true and very human and very endearing about that from a lyricist...at least to me...like a struggle that i think we all have in some way, possibly the tragedy of the times, nobody knows how to mean it anymore...or whether they even should cuz everyones too busy being cool.

He seemed to really be perfecting this whole thing by the time In Utero came around, i would have loved to see where it went from there.

Yeah, i like it Bleach i mean, i like it

Edited March 21, 2009 by dirtylenny

[ARC]

Fucking incredible album...really dense kinda mudhoney motorcycle rev type guitar sound around some really hooky catchy shit, essentially really pop music thrown in the mud and kicked around for half an hour. Sounds fucking delicious though. Really forceful and i think part of that is the grasp of how the right tempo suits the right song.

About a Girl is fuckin cool, totally Beatley track. School stands out too, i think too, that fuckin riff man, makes me wanna pound through fuckin walls...worked so much better with Grohl on the kit too, if ever a track was made for being played live this was it...And that fuckin riff, amazing, simple, direct, brilliant.

Love Buzz too, fuckin brilliant, hypnotic ring around the rosie riff thats perfect for live performance, so much of Nirvanas stuff worked so incredibley better for live performance...not that these recordings dont cut the mustard cuz they fuckin rip it up.

Papercuts i love cuz its serious fuckin noise :) The way i like it. And the lyrics are fucking weird...cool...dark...odd images about submission and submissiveness. This is a running motif in Cobains writing i find...lots of his little lines and non-sequitars are always about submissiveness like..."hand down your umbilical noose so i can climb right back" etc and this whole fucking song is full of that shit...kinda base observational descriptions of weird fuckin submissive imagery...insanity and...i dunno, its definitely one of Cobains more interesting lyrical offerings, i mean check it out:

When I'm feeling tired. She puts food through the door.

I crawl towards the cursed light. Sometimes I can't find my way.

Newspapers spin' round. Soaking all that they can.

The cleaning is too kind. A good hosing down.

The lady whom I feel a maternal love for.

Cannot look me in the eyes.

But I see hers and they are blue.

And they cock and twist and masturbate.

I say so [x3]

Nirvana [x6]

Black windows a problem. I scratch with my nails.

I see others just like me. Why do they not try to escape.

But we're not the only ones. They point in my way.

They come with the flashing lights. And take my famliy away.

And very later I have learned to accept some friends of ridicule.

My whole existence is for your amusement.

And thatis why I'm here with you.

Don't take me away. I've found. Nirvana [x8]

Reminds me almost of the sort of shit William S Burroughs wrote...thematically i mean...its in that kinda vein...kinda like base sensory observations of like...submissiveness and captivity, deprivation. Polly is like that too i find, very much like that. Floyd the Barber too if you think about it.

I think cuz the rock/metal/heavy/meathead fuckin genre is full of like...gross out kinda shit this song is overlooked as being in that sort of vein but, i for one think theres a helluva lot more in there than that.

Negative Creep is brilliant too, snappy, a toe-tapper, again brilliant for live performance again with that kinda hypnotic thing that Love Buzz has. One lesson that Nirvana seemed REALLY aware of is that simplicity and repetition work....and if you do it right, if you're good at it, people will remember your shit til their death beds.

Scoff is brilliant too, again, that repeated riff and that repeated lyric, just a neat little song.

Kurt lyrics are incredibley interesting, not always in and of themselves but their effectiveness and the effectiveness in which he conveys them...i think Kurt spent his entire career as a lyricist kinda battling his own sarcasm. Like he had trouble writing without kinda making fun of it while he was doing it which i suppose you could say could be like a defence mechanism but i dont think so.

I dont think his lyrics were immature in this album, not in any negative sense, theres a sense of humor in most of Cobains lyrics but its very understated. Mr Moustache is a great example of this...where he seems to have these really kinda gentle needy ideals permeating through a song and he has to like...throw in "easy in an easy chair, poop as hard as rock" to kind of offset what could very well have been some kinda sincerely-meant stuff.

His lyrics are also very broad and non-specific a lot which is brilliant from a listeners perspective because it offers you so much ground for interpretation. Anyone looking for overtly profound "Momma put my guns in the ground" aint gonna find it outta old Kurt Donald but i am definitely a believer in the fact that Kurt Cobain was one of the best lyricists of all time, flat out...definitely up there with the best of them.

Theres so much awareness in his lyrics, he seems to like...be like constantly offsetting by which i mean....OK, as a performer, the way i see it, to some degree, no matter how self effacing you are, before you get up there, you gotta believe that you got something worth saying that people should listen too and thats not always an easy thing to reconcile with oneself i think, so you constantly get this thing of OK, the minute you think he's said something thats skirting around "a message" or sincerity or whatever he'll immediately make fun of it and theres something very true and very human and very endearing about that from a lyricist...at least to me...like a struggle that i think we all have in some way, possibly the tragedy of the times, nobody knows how to mean it anymore...or whether they even should cuz everyones too busy being cool.

He seemed to really be perfecting this whole thing by the time In Utero came around, i would have loved to see where it went from there.

Yeah, i like it Bleach i mean, i like it

Wow. Seriously dude, that's a great post.

This album seems to move/affect you in a real way, which is what good albums should do.

I definately think 'Bleach' is one of the most underrated album out there. People tend to pass it off as the album where Kurt was just 'cutting his teeth' or 'learning the ropes' or some stupid shit like that. It's far more than that.

Funny, but it seems to me that almost everything regarding Nirvana was better BEFORE they got famous and went huge... and that includes live shows - some of their shows from 89'/90' were sick and heavy as hell....

[Guest Satanisk_Slakt]

Very good album. I like both In Utero and Nevermind better however.

[mr. orangestone]

Very good album. I like both In Utero and Nevermind better however.

I agree. Bleach is a cool record though.

[LCG]

Bleach is my favorite Nirvana album

[Dead Flower]

Paper Cuts is like the grunge prototype song.

Great album.

[wasted]

I like Blew.

[Guest]

I like Bleach, but I prefer In Utero