November 25-December 1, 2004

music

cdreview

Nirvana - With the Lights Out (box set)

Nirvana

With the Lights Out

Rock/box

Never mind the legal fray, the defensive bandmates, the apeshit ex and the amateur archivists who claim there's sooo much more out there. With the Lights Out is finally here to speak for itself. And what—with its 68 previously unreleased tracks, illustrated liner notes and extensive live footage—does it say? Mostly what we already know: Nirvana was an elegant but untamable animal perched at the crossroads of punk, metal and pop. Assembled pretty much chronologically, the CDs start at the first show (covering Led Zep's "Heartbreaker" at a house party in '87) and wind through radio gigs, studio outtakes and Kurt Cobain's embryonic acoustic demos (most notably the simple, gritty "Opinion"). If nothing else, Light is audiovisual evidence of a band that momentarily changed everything. Nirvana's fame might have seemed unlikely at first, but its importance looks inevitable in retrospect, even if the memory has faded a bit. You can read the lyrics as "tortured" all you like (hard not to), but this is no eulogy for its suicidal star. In fact, nowhere in the liner notes—not in the band chronology, not in the essays by Thurston Moore or Neil Strauss—does it actually say what finally happened to Cobain and Nirvana. You'd almost believe he walked away from it.

—Patrick Rapa