In Utero

Twelve tracks in about forty-one minutes, none over five, and nearly every one passes the subtractive test. Serve the Servants must open: it answers the previous record’s fame before anything else can be said. Heart-Shaped Box carries the governing image, Frances Farmer the one figure from history, and All Apologies the required end, the only place the record lays down its arms. Dumb is the rest the first assault needs. The test bites in three places, and lightly. Very Ape and tourette’s, under a tenth of the time together, repeat a jolt Scentless Apprentice has already delivered at more force, and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter stretches one grinding figure past its use. Those three hold the figure.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a person made into a public commodity is consumed through his body and his privacy, and the consumption is a violation the consumer does not see. Serve the Servants opens on “teenage angst” having paid off, and turns at once to the wish to “have a father”. Frances Farmer gives the condition a history, an actress of Seattle broken by press, family and asylum, who will “come back as fire”. Rape Me turns violation into an offer no listener can accept without seeing what he does. Sound discloses as fully as words: tenderness and abrasion alternate until they are heard as one wound. What holds it short of the bar is the collage. Images of birth, illness and anatomy are set side by side more than articulated.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation comes often and is mostly dreadful. Heart-Shaped Box is the summit: a slow, ugly verse over a descending figure, then a chorus that rises to “a new complaint” with the voice tearing at its top. Scentless Apprentice is terror, Grohl’s drum pattern under a scream repeated until it stops being a voice. Frances Farmer lifts at its chorus into the record’s one open melody, a melody of revenge, and Pennyroyal Tea lifts too. Dumb and All Apologies give the warm height, cello under a plain voice, and All Apologies ends in a round, “all in all” sung under the noise, the last and most generous rise. Very Ape, Milk It and tourette’s have force without height, and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter is level by design: six or seven of twelve rise.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth is evoked richly and built in one frame: the womb. The title names it; the sleeve’s anatomical angel and the back cover’s fetuses among orchids carry it; Heart-Shaped Box sets love as a body one is locked inside, Pennyroyal Tea names an old abortifacient, and Serve the Servants a birth into a family that failed. A frame borne by the sleeve and by three songs is more than allusion. Around it stand figures: Grenouille, the murderer without a smell from Süskind’s Perfume, in Scentless Apprentice; Frances Farmer as a modern witch who returns as fire; the singer as the figure his audience consumes. What holds it short of the bar is construction. The womb is laid across the record more than enacted by its sequence, and the other figures are borrowed.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own: the underground noise rock of Bleach, the Pixies’ quiet and loud, the Melvins and Big Black, and the polished hard rock of Nevermind, which had made the band the largest in its field. The turn is against that last record. A band at commercial height hired the engineer of Surfer Rosa, recorded in a cold room, left the drums and the voice raw, and put songs called Rape Me and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter on a major-label follow-up. The stake was the band’s own standing, spent against its own success. The turn is one of nerve more than invention, and that marks its limit: it went back to a language proven in the underground, the quiet and loud song stayed, and two singles were remixed for radio.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the record loses what it knows, because its knowledge is in its sound. A record about a self consumed as product refuses to sound like a product: the drums are heard in their room, the voice is dry and close, and songs that could be hits are allowed to collapse into feedback. Polished, these songs would be complaints about fame delivered as its merchandise; recorded this way, the abrasion is the argument. The sequence is counted here, once: it opens on the fame of the last record, sets the tender songs at intervals, and closes on a round of acceptance. Held short of the top by the two remixed singles, whose softer surface breaks the argument at its two most exposed points, and by Very Ape and tourette’s, which fill the form.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over thirty-three years. The record has been returned to steadily, and its making keeps it open: the twentieth-anniversary set of 2013 added a new mix by Albini, so that the record can be heard two ways. The words, assembled from images of birth, illness and anatomy, give more on return than at first hearing, and Heart-Shaped Box and Pennyroyal Tea hold readings that do not settle. Musicians still study Grohl’s drumming and the sound of the room. What holds the figure: a share of the return is projection, the record read through the singer’s death the next spring, so that its lines are mined as evidence instead of heard as songs; and the formal yield, though real, is narrower than the semantic.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the rock album of the 1990s, and the border between the underground and the mass market. The intrinsic force is real: the largest band in its field delivered an abrasive, unvarnished album to a major label and kept its public, and set a standard of recorded rawness, drums in their room and voice undoctored, against the polished alternative rock that came after Nevermind. Much of the band’s redirection of the field belongs to that record, not to this one, and none of it is counted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record reached the top of the American chart, its singles stayed in broadcast, and it became a model for bands meeting a large audience on underground terms, with Albini’s methods carried into the major-label world after it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the twelve-track release of 1993 is still the record sold, and the later mix stands beside it, not in its place. Presence is continuous and wide: Heart-Shaped Box and All Apologies remain in broadcast, the record is heard whole, and it is placed high whenever its decade is counted. Part of that presence is charged, carried by the legend that grew around the singer’s death and by the larger fame of the previous record. The fabric is little fixed to its year: a trio in a room, recorded plainly, with none of the gated or processed sound of its period. It stands level with The Bends, and far below what has lasted centuries.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Albini’s recording is load-bearing: the drums placed in the room so that Grohl’s playing, the pattern of Scentless Apprentice and the dynamics of Milk It, sounds as physical event; the guitar left harsh; the voice set close and dry. Grohl’s drumming is the record’s highest craft. Cobain’s voice runs from the near whisper of Dumb to the shredded cry of the Heart-Shaped Box chorus, controlled at both ends, and Novoselic’s bass holds the slow songs. The writing is economical, hooks placed and then attacked. The faults are several: the remixed singles do not match the record’s sound, the guitar solos are rudimentary by choice, Very Ape and tourette’s are slight, and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter is a sketch extended.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One law governs the record: the body exposed and consumed, and tenderness and violence heard as the same wound. The two most distant elements are tourette’s, a minute and a half of screaming, and All Apologies, a lullaby with cello, and they obey the law as its two poles, the wound shouted and the wound offered. Dumb, “I think I’m dumb”, is the law at rest, the consumed self accepting its smallness. Frances Farmer gives the law a history; Scentless Apprentice gives it a predator. The range runs from punk sprint to dirge, ballad with strings and noise. What holds the figure: the two remixed singles bend the law in sound, sweeter than their neighbours, and the palette, a trio with cello on two songs, is narrow. The law strains and does not break.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as exhaustion, illness and self-contempt, Milk It’s “my own parasite”. The body is held fully, and it is the record’s ground: birth, pregnancy, illness, sex, violation. The family is present: a father in Serve the Servants, a womb and a child implied on the sleeve. Fame, the press and the market are held in Serve the Servants and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter. History enters once, in Frances Farmer and the Seattle that broke her. The sacred is glimpsed, in an angel on the sleeve and a “Leonard Cohen afterworld”. Labour, the state and the natural order beyond the body are absent. One consciousness joins the orders, and several are images more than held: that holds the figure lowest.

Score: 7.8 / 10