Various - Whatever Nevermind Album

Here is my crack at a semi-formal review for this album. I’ll start by saying I have followed Robotic Empire for several years and was familiar with a lot of these bands already, both of which led me to be excited for this release. I picked it up at my store the day it came out.

A quick summary would be that while it isn’t a terrible album, I sort of regret purchasing it. I say sort of because it has grown on me over several listens, and I guess it’s something good to have in the collection for a few of the songs. But I should have listened to it somewhere else first. I'm just a huge fan of this Nirvana album, so I thought there's no way they could screw this up, and judging by the bands on it, it has to at least be interesting, right? For the most part, wrong. I know cover albums are tough because I already love the original songs, so this is me being gentle and toned down from initial reactions. I'll break it down by positives and negatives.

POSITIVES: Starting on the plus side, the artwork is great. The outer jacket and discs labels are very cool. The discs themselves are a pretty blue, and I had no difficulties playing it at all. No surface noise, pops, skips, warping, anything. My favorite thing here is Thou’s cover of “Endless, Nameless” hiding out on the 7”. They absolutely destroy that track. Nice to hear someone truly wreak some havoc on this release, and you have to wait way too long, this being a Robotic Empire collection. Highlights on the LP include a nice hard-edged version of “Stay Away” from Wrong (which happens to be one of three bands I am not familiar with on this record) and an extra mopey version of “On a Plain” by Pygmy Lush that I really like what they did to the chorus of. I’ll give an honorable mention to Boris’s sludge rendition of “Lithium” purely for the sake of breaking up the monotony of the main disc and doing something out of left field relative to the other tracks here.

NEGATIVES: Before I get into the rest of the music, a note about the sound quality. It is quite bad. In a lot of cases this is intentional by the bands doing lo-fi recordings, but I am talking about the pressing. Very compressed sounding: thin with little punch. Have to crank the system to get to a decent volume.

As for the music, too much of it comes off to me as totally uninspired. A number of the songs are such perfect replicas of the original tracks that if I heard out them of the blue, you could tell me they were some bootleg alternate/live recordings of Nirvana themselves performing the song and I would believe you (see In Bloom, Breed, Territorial Pissings, and Drain You). The Torche vocalist actually has a pretty amazing Kurt-like voice for the “In Bloom” choruses. I wouldn’t normally complain so much about some solid Nirvana covers, except I was really hoping for some different takes on these tracks. I mean c'mon, it was marketed as: “Reinterpretations by 13 diverse groups.”

As for butcherings, these include Kylesa doing “Come As You Are,” Young Widows’ “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and Nothing on “Something in the Way.” Kylesa (who I am actually a pretty big fan of) slows the track down to snooze tempo and does nothing else to it besides taking the emotion out of the vocals. On Teen Spirit, I applaud Young Widows for trying to do something different with a track (the lack of which was the biggest letdown for me) and nothing else. It is a mechanical-feeling dud. The absence of drum variation is infuriating. And call me crazy, but I might touch on the melody of one of the most iconic riffs in rock history at some point if I’m covering that song. Then to close the album out, Nothing goes extra depressing with a Trent Reznor style piano/vocal sadsplosion and it makes me depressed listening to it. “Something In The Way” is a song I personally would have loved to see taken the opposite direction with how movingly sad the original is.

As I mentioned, I was decently upset when I first put this record on, but it does get a lot better as it goes on. You’ll notice two of my least favorite were the first two songs haha. Thus concludes my review. 3 stars for half the album being good and the artwork.