With The Lights Out

Album Description

The box set spans Nirvana's entire career, from a recording of Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" at the band's first show in 1987 to solo acoustic performances from singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain in 1994. With The Lights Out features a 60-page color booklet with rare photos and liner notes by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and writer Neil Strauss. The three CDs, arranged largely chronologically contains home and rehearsal demos, including for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (whose lyric "With the lights out" provides the set's title), "Rape Me," "Heart Shaped Box" and a trio penned by legendary bluesman Leadbelly. Heard in the 12 previously unreleased solo acoustic tracks are such gems as "All Apologies," "Lithium" and "Sliver." Six previously unreleased radio performances range from "Anorexorcist" in 1987 to "Dumb" in 1991 (two years before it was on 1993's In Utero). Along with the remaining debuts are a handful of earlier issued, though rare, b-sides and demos as well as the original Butch Vig mix of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Highlighted on the With The Lights Out DVD is a previously unreleased video of nine songs performed in 1988 at bassist Krist Novoselic's mother's house in Aberdeen, Washington; the rare "In Bloom" Sub Pop music video, and 10 never-before-seen live performances. Noteworthy among them are debut renditions of "Pennyroyal Tea", "Smells Like Teen Spirit" both from early 1991. Also premiering is an unlikely performance of Jacques Brel and Rod McKuen's "Seasons In The Sun" shot at a Rio de Janeiro studio.

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Nirvana may have been the biggest thing in the music world in the early '90s, but the trio maintained an uncommon devotion to core fans who knew them when they were still sleeping in a van. Fending off the adoration of punk-rock dabblers in the media and their audience while simultaneously welcoming stalwart underground-music supporters, Kurt Cobain did things on his own terms--until it all came crashing down. A decade after Cobain's 1994 suicide and the band's demise, With the Lights Out remains true to the ethos that defined the band and the alt-rock revolution that rose and fell with them.

Eschewing the standard hits-sprinkled-with-rarities mix, this lovingly compiled three-CD, one-DVD collection is made up almost entirely of previously unreleased selections. The handful of previously heard tracks are obscurities along the lines of the group's cover of "Here She Comes Now," recorded for a 1990 indie-rock tribute to the Velvet Underground. But it's not the B-sides and compilation oddities that define this idiosyncratic set; rather, its spirit is captured in the bedroom demos, radio performances, and sloppy amateur video recordings that catch Cobain and cohorts developing from just another punk- and metal-inspired bunch of grunge rockers pounding away in the bass player's mom's living room into a band that defined an era. --Steven Stolder