Disc Disappointment Faulty Recording, Short Length Make The New Nirvana Live Collection A Real Letdown

Nirvana “Live from the Muddy Banks of the Wiskah” (DGC)

The new and perhaps final Nirvana album, “Live from the Muddy Banks of the Wiskah,” isn’t going to rocket fans to nirvana.

It will barely lift them out of their seats.

Anyone expecting this album to transcend Nirvana’s studio records, “Nevermind” and “In Utero,” will be utterly disappointed. “Muddy Banks” is too short. The sound quality is rickety. And there are few surprises.

Maybe this second posthumous release should have been left buried beneath the mucky shores of the Wiskah River, which spills through Kurt Cobain’s old stomping grounds, Aberdeen.

A live electric album sounded like a promising endeavor - an uninhibited set from one of the most cathartic and significant bands of the 1990s.

The acoustic “Unplugged in New York,” released in 1994, was an outstanding release, but it wasn’t the note Nirvana should have ended on.

The Seattle band’s songs demand volume and plenty of it. That’s what made their concerts legendary. And that’s what this album tries to convey.

But volume also covered up many of Nirvana’s shortcomings. Cobain wasn’t always a flawless player. His fingers sometimes stumbled onto wrong notes. At ear-splitting decibels, his minor mistakes usually went by unnoticed.

Cobain’s flaws on “Muddy Banks” are easily heard on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Aneurysm.”

But those are trivial.

The main problem with “Muddy Banks” is that it’s much too short. It contains only 16 songs (17, if you count the pointless 52-second introduction) from 10 concerts between 1989 and 1994. Altogether, the album clocks in at a measly, wallet-gouging 53 minutes. Typical CDs can accommodate 75 minutes of music.

Supposedly, “Muddy Banks” was carefully assembled by drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic, who sifted through hundreds of hours of concert tapes earlier this year. Surely, they could have unearthed enough worthwhile material to fill an entire disc or even two discs.

Sixteen songs doesn’t cut it. Nirvana concerts were much longer than that.

Of course, Novoselic appears to be optimistic about “Muddy Banks”’ value. In the press materials that accompanied this disc, he writes: “Hopefully, people who didn’t get to see us live will get a flavor of what the band was all about.”

A flavor, but not a true taste.

This disc does not capture Nirvana’s aggressive and liberating live persona. Very few live albums do.

The wavering sound quality is another sore spot. In some places, the record sounds as amateurish as a bootleg, a common occurrence when a song’s recording originates from a soundboard tape.

Recording the band from the board is not always the best method, mainly because the soundboard captures exactly what’s being fed into the microphones. For instance, in a small hall, the guitars aren’t turned up as high as the vocals because they project enough sound through the amplifiers and don’t need a boost from microphones. You’ll notice on “Muddy Banks” that Cobain’s vocals are too prominent in the mix.

One of the purposes of live albums is to thwart bootlegging. Unfortunately, most of the 10 shows represented on “Muddy Banks” have been available in one form or another for a couple of years on bootlegs CDs. “Unplugged in New York” was available on several bootlegs before its release two years ago.

“Blew,” “Lithium,” “School” and “Been a Son” were all recorded in Amsterdam in 1991. And all four songs are available on various bootlegs.

So are “Drain You,” “Aneurysm” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which were recorded in Del Mar, Calif., in 1991. Plus, the songs were used for a Westwood One radio broadcast in 1995.

“Scentless Apprentice” was taken from the 1993 MTV broadcast, “Live and Loud.”

I hate to advocate bootlegs, but there are better Nirvana live albums than this one.

The band’s Seattle show on Halloween at the Paramount Theatre in 1991 and their Rome concert in 1994 are among the best Nirvana performances caught on tape. Both concerts, by the way, were recorded professionally.

The Seattle show also yielded one of the earliest versions of “Rape Me” and a stellar electric rendering of the Vaselines song “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” The Rome date, commonly referred to as “Roma,” was one of Nirvana’s final concerts.

Only one song from the Seattle recording, “Negative Creep,” made the cut on “Muddy Banks.” Why they didn’t include more songs from these shows seems odd.

“Muddy Banks” isn’t altogether littered with blunders. Though they’re sparse, there are some highlights.

Nirvana unleashed scorching renditions of “Milk It” (recorded at their final Seattle show) and “Tourettes” (captured at the Redding Festival in England in 1992).

The version of “Polly,” with the band plugged in, is another high point. Fans who have heard this non-acoustic crunching incarnation have dubbed it “Punk-Rock Polly.”

For those fans who don’t possess a live Nirvana recording, “Live from the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah” is an acceptable starting point. Superior recordings do exist. It may take some digging but it’s worth it.

What makes this album so disappointing is that this will likely be the final Nirvana release. Grohl and Novoselic should have had the foresight to include more material. Why not pack three dozen songs onto a double album? If people are willing to shell out $50 for bootleg double albums, obviously there is a demand.

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