Must be, as those across the pond so cheerily refer to it, the holiday season again. As if the Christmas lights already going up on my high street wasn’t enough (hey, welcome to October!), the arrival of repackaged and mildly reheated former glories on our shelves should finally give it away. You both expect and accept this, of course you do. You made it happen! What else are you going to buy your little brother come 4.30pm on 24th December? What precisely is your mum going to get you for God’s sake, her modern ‘music’ obsessed offspring, when The Osmonds were the last band she could listen to without getting a migraine. Ask her for The Rakes and she may well wander off towards B&Q in a perplexed stupor.
Christmas is for making people happy after all, and what is going to make people happier than receiving something they already like, packaged just slightly differently? This particular compilation, however, might be considered to possess some worth. Depending on your patience, devotion to the 90’s most era-defining band, and expectation of the phrase “previously unreleased tracks”. You’re going to fall one way or the other. You’re either a completist or you’re not. And you either have the stomach for scratchy, questionable, untreated tape recordings of a man thrashing a badly distorted guitar, or you don’t.
Courtney Love, like Jeff Buckley’s mum before her, might have you believe that this is public service. It’s not. It’s unwillingness to let a legacy die with its creator, and it’s an income, a college fund. And at least Buckley left a trove of unheard and, to an extent, completed material behind. ‘Sliver’ (what significance the randomly picked song title has to this collection we don’t know) is a collection of demo versions, edited picks from the multi-CD rarities box set ‘With the Lights Out’ that only the truly clinically diagnosed shelled out for last year. So, is this more appetising version likely to compliment your existing understanding of the band and the man?
No. Or little, at most. There are songs that you might not have heard much of before, if ever. ‘Opinion’ is a upbeat acoustic strum in the traditional coarse Cobain melodic tradition, ‘Sappy’ is a tuneful ‘Bleach’ hangover that you can see veering towards the accepted-alternative that broke them. ‘Old Age’ is a ‘Nevermind’ leftover, but sounds like college Lemonheads wannabes. ‘Oh The Guilt’ is standard Nirvana fare, but already fairly familiar to any ardent Nirvanahead as a split 7” with The Jesus Lizard. They’re interesting, as a convenient insight. But then the gaps are filled by almost uniformly bad, crackly sketch versions of songs already famous the world over, which do nothing to help us understand their evolution.
These ongoing collections do more to cheapen the memory of a band whose open hearted song surgery was often genuinely breathtaking, than they do enhance it, at all. They utterly betray the attention to detail that Cobain was famously obsessive about. And they belittle the perfectly formed monument to their existence that was already formed by the time he passed away.