Nirvana –‘Sliver: The Best of The Box’ (Geffen) Released 31/10/05

Prepare to be scared...

October 31, 2005 by Kenn Taylor

Nirvana –‘Sliver: The Best of The Box’ (Geffen) Released 31/10/05

More Nirvana

And on goes the flogging of the dead horse. A fine horse admittedly, one of the best ever, a good runner with a lot of life in it. But its corpse has now been hacked at so much that the innards are just everywhere, it’s a terrible mess. Last year the whole body was up for grabs in the ‘With The Lights Out’ box set and for those without that sort of cash here it is. Condensed from the box set into one 22-track disc with three unheard before tracks tacked on to make sure even the box-set completeists have to come up with another few quid just to say ‘I have absolutely everything darling’. And the contents? Well it sounds unsurprisingly like the difficult birth of Nirvana’s brilliance. Even on these badly recorded demos and live tracks the astonishing talent of Kurt and co. can be heard coming through, but only just.

Some of the classics are here in early form; a home demo of ‘About a Girl’ hardly changed in composition from the track ‘Bleach’ shows Kurt’s early knack for pop while at the other end of the timeline a rough demo of ‘Heart Shaped Box’ his demons even more visible before the producers got there hands on it. There are some interesting little moments; ‘Aint it a Shame’ is an unexpected country rock sing-along and live acoustic track ‘Opinion’ is a bitter but eloquent dig at the press. Meanwhile ‘Old Age’ is a good track cut from ‘Nevermind’, good but obviously cut because it couldn’t match up to the rest of the album.

As for the previously unreleased tracks there are sadly no unfinished symphonies to write home about; ‘Spank Thru’ a 1985 demo shows the band’s hardcore beginnings, ‘Sappy’ is some unexciting, bass-heavy grunge and the boom box version of ‘Come As You Are’ sounds like…er….'Come As You Are’ recorded on a boom box’ i.e. a bit crap. ‘Lithium’, ‘Silver’, ‘About a girl’, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’-great songs all included on this album, but they’re just not different enough from the actual releases to even make them interesting to listen to in order to hear their development.

It's Nirvana so of course it's not shit, but what’s here is mostly crap that was left out of the records because it didn’t match up to the standard of their other work or poor early versions of some of there best tracks. There are few hidden gems, little in the way of vastly different versions of the greats, so why bother buying? This album sounds like exactly what it is, the rough sketches of a great band. But when we have the brilliant finished products, do we really need to see the contents of the waste bin and the quickly scrawled initial plans?

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