Culling Nirvana’s old and shoddy

Mike Newmark Assistant News Editor

In 1985, a lanky, pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain dropped out of high school, formed his first band, and recorded a demo tape under the charming name Fecal Matter. The tape quickly faded from public attention until Nirvana’s genre-defining breakthrough, Nevermind, in 1991 and Cobain’s ugly suicide in 1994. Since then, diehard fans have been clamoring for rarities, b-sides, outtakes, demos, and anything remotely related to Nirvana, no matter how amateurish or poorly recorded. Included at the top of their wish lists was the Fecal Matter tape, which had not seen the light of day, even in bootleg form, since 1985.

After various legal disputes lasting nearly ten years, Courtney Love was able to do her late husband’s fans a service by releasing everything in the vaults at once. The final product was 2004’s With the Lights Out, a 61-track box set containing Nirvana rarities, alternate takes, and everything in between. The one thing it lacked, however, was the Fecal Matter demo, which helps explain the somewhat ludicrous release of Sliver: The Best of the Box a mere year later. As the title indicates, Sliver extracts the “best” songs from last year’s overblown box set and adds three new tracks as bait: “Sappy,” a demo of “Come As You Are,” and “Spank Thru” from the famous you-know-what demo tape.

Are the three new Sliver tracks worth shelling out 15 bucks for a batch of songs that most Nirvana diehards already own? This reviewer doesn’t think so, and it’s important to note that the new tracks are coveted for historical reasons, not artistic ones. “Sappy” is the only track of the three with any musical merit, and it’s passable at best. Recorded in 1990, the song shows Cobain beginning to find his voice, but possesses the feeling of a Nevermind outtake (not to mention the fact that the song is known more for its mysterious title—sometimes called “Sappy” and sometimes called “Verse Chorus Verse”—than for its actual music). The demo of “Come As You Are,” recorded for Nevermind producer Butch Vig, is so poorly mastered that it’s not even listenable as a pure curiosity.

Though “Sappy” and the “Come As You Are” demo are criminally mediocre, “Spank Thru” is awful in a different way. Terrible recording and mixing aside, the music itself is a plodding interpretation of scrappy 1980s punk rock, giving no indication of the fiery passion Nirvana would later create. Cobain carelessly switches from tuneless, painfully disinterested talk-singing to emotive moaning to GG Allin-like vomit-screaming, and the lyrics are hilariously bad (“I can spank it, I can beat it, masturbate it!”). This is the sort of garbage that would have been performed at your eighth-grade talent show by the class perverts, who would manage to get through less than half the song before being booed offstage.

Sliver is not entirely worthless, since it really does gather “the best of the box.” Notable tracks include the actual Nevermind outtake, “Old Age,” which could easily be sandwiched between “Territorial Pissings” and “Drain You,” as well as the uneasy “Do Re Mi”—supposedly the last song Cobain ever recorded. At its most cynical, however, Sliver is simply another way that Courtney Love can make some fast money off the backs of gullible, bootleg-hungry buyers. Suffice to say that Sliver will hold little if any value for those who aren’t enamored with Cobain’s shoddy home recordings, and who happen to think that Fecal Matter is a really terrible name for a band.