I've been writing this blog for years and this is the first Nirvana record I've written about. It's funny given that Nirvana were one of the first bands everyone got into or heard about - it seemed that every band at my school would cover Smells Like Teen Spirit.
My introduction to Bleach happened back when I was at school. A guy I kinda knew gave a copy of Bleach to a friend and I was instantly intrigued - I had no idea who this band were but assumed they were a new, cool band - this was at least a year before I'd start to get into music properly so I really had no clue. When I found out that Bleach came out in 1989 my world was suddenly opened up to a world of music that was neither current nor of my parent's era (kids with older siblings probably never had this experience).
A little while later I was at the local library with my parents and found a copy of Bleach in amongst the cds you could borrow. It was £1 to borrow a cd and this was before I had a job so I had to spend my very limited pocket-money to hear Nirvana; I decided it was worth the money. When I got home and played the cd I was not remotely prepared for what hit me. Bleach, to my young and uneducated ears, was a wall of noise, fuzz and guitars. I had never heard anything like it.
This isn't some fairy-tale of instantly being converted into a grunge fan though. I recorded the album onto cassette, listened to it a few times before misplacing it somewhere. I wouldn't hear Bleach again until I bought this copy aged 18 - in the intervening years I'd had the typical exposure to Nevermind and In Utero and the cult of Nirvana and a wealth of other music. It was strange going back to Bleach after so much had happened.
Listening to Bleach now, and back at 18, I can't help but think of 13-year-old me sat by my parent's hifi being blasted with punk-rock for the first time. This album is so deeply linked to that early memory it's hard to think of anything else.
In reality, I rarely listen to Nirvana. I fully appreciate the status and importance of the band and I think they were very good, however I don't go back to their albums very often at all. Grunge for me was Soundgarden and Mudhoney. I like Bleach for its raw, dark sound. The comparisons to Melvins are much clearer on this album than anything else Nirvana did and I like that. School, Love Buzz and Negative Creep are by far the highlights for me. They certainly didn't catch my ear so well when I was 13, which is a shame - the wails of "No recess" on School should have been the thing I needed to cut through the wall of noise I perceived. I really should listen to Bleach more often.
I picked up this copy at a record fair in 2003 for a slightly pricey £15 - it is the 2002 reissue, which explains how it is in such mint condition (although I did end up accidentally knifing the bottom edge of the picture sleeve by dropping the record into it on carpet not long after I got it - an important lesson learnt there). I read somewhere that early copies had the "Kurdt" spelling but I guess they decided to crack that out again for the reissue.
Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £15 new
Bought: Record Fair, Southampton
When: 23/01/03
Colour: White
Etching: none
mp3s: no
