Nothing that any artist makes is usually as good as the version that they heard in their head. It’s one thing to get everything right in the studio once, but there are so many times when things start to take a different turn in the mixing process and go from a pure artistic statement into some watered-down version of what they were trying to say. Although Kurt Cobain had his fair share of problems with almost any Nirvana project, he thought that Incesticide was probably the closest to what the group was actually like.
When listening to the album on its own, no one would have believed that this was the same group that had just come off of Nevermind. Fans had already gotten on board with songs like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Come As You Are’, and yet these were the kind of rough songs that seemed to go on wild tangents and not have any rhyme or reason to them.
That’s not to say that it was completely devoid of tunes, though. ‘Stain’ is one of the most underrated cuts that the group ever made, and while most of the tunes have more of a nervy edge to them, they almost feel like the building blocks in between Bleach and Nevermind, with the poppy covers of ‘Molly’s Lips’ balanced out by extended jams like ‘Big Long Now’.
For Cobain, that was always the perfect balance that he was hoping to get, recalling in an interview, “Have you heard the Incesticide record? That’s the kind of band we used to be. We used to be more like Gang of Four or new wave-influenced. More experimental with effects boxes and stuff. Then we started to get into the straight-ahead grunge music, which is what Bleach was like.”
Although those kinds of strange experiments don’t always lead to the greatest singles, Incesticide is a hell of a trip for any Nirvana fan. Take a song like ‘Hairspray Queen’, for example. That entire track is a hot mess from front to back with virtually no coherent melody to speak of, but it gives off the vibe of a bunch of musicians jamming in their garage and not giving two shits what anyone thought of them.
And if you listen to what In Utero was shaping up to be, Cobain was starting to get back into that version of rock and roll all over again. There were still the big choruses left over from Nevermind, but something like ‘Milk It’ or ‘Tourette’s’ probably wouldn’t have existed without their B-sides coming out first.
In fact, this might be the version of the group that Cobain was trying to create before everything started to move towards pop music. Even Krist Novoselic had said that everything came from that dissonant punk world at the beginning of their career, but once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took over the charts, the new fans were just expecting to see them make the same style of song over again.
However, whereas Nevermind was looking to capitalise on a trend, Incesticide was when the group started working with different textures. They had the power to make the same pop tunes that made them famous, but where would be the fun in that?
