Three 65, Day 50
Nirvana, In Utero

I've reached Day 50, and cannot believe I've gone 49 full days without once covering a Nirvana album. Granted, they don't have the largest discography in history - they're no Grateful Dead - but they are one of the most important bands in history.

The metalheads all love Bleach, and everyone loves Nevermind; no one but a weirdo would state that Incesticide is their favorite Nirvana record. But it takes a true punk to prefer In Utero over anything else in the band's recorded output. For me, this album - the last one the band put out, before vocalist/guitarist Kurt Cobain screwed the pooch and blew his brains out - is the epitome of Nirvana-ness, the ultimate sound the band wanted to produce.

Atonal and dissonant, intentionally abrasive, In Utero is Nirvana at their snarly best. Take a look at the first line on the album: "Teenage angst has paid off well / now I'm bored and old." Unlike other bands who only played at discomfort (namely Pearl Jam), Nirvana was genuinely shocked at their success, and a little more than off-put by it, too. So they responded to their newly found fame by putting out the rawest, angriest album possible.

In Utero has no accessible "in," other than maybe "All Apologies" (and even that ends with feedback); it's all sharp edges. And even with that intentional fuck-you posture, it still comes off as a pure pop-rock album. Take "Rape Me," for example, which caused such a consternation with big chain retailers: a song with such a violent subject comes off as a total anthem, a document of vulnerability so poignant it could only have come from Cobain.

I'll be honest. I prefer the difficult stuff to the easy stuff, any day of the week. But Nirvana sugarcoats its jagged little pills so well, it's hard to tell the difference here.