Montage Of Heck: The Home Recordings

Nearly everything here feels unfinished, and, for those seeking undiscovered gems from one of the greats, that might be a deal-breaker. The Home Recordings is not an easy listen. To appreciate The Home Recordings is to give yourself over to Cobain’s process, because it’s his freewheeling desire for discovery that propels these tracks.

Essential? For completists. Worth hearing? Absolutely. [7 Nov 2015, p.50]

Some of the 31 tracks will resonate only with deep Nirvana scholars, and the album could be seen as stretching an incredible legacy a little too thin. But it’s surprising how much of it is compelling, even revelatory.

Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is essentially an audio sketchbook, and its contents are necessarily rough, half-formed, and fragmentary. There is pleasure to be found here, particularly in Cobain’s left-field excursions into Burroughs-ian collage, but these pleasures will hold scant value to anyone not already convinced of the author’s peculiar genius.

This is for completists.

While there are a few pops and crackles of magic--it's often dead air. [Jan 2016, p.114]

The amoebic versions of Nirvana songs sound only unfinished and strange. If the goal was to render Cobain an artsy oddball more than a rock god with a Midas touch, then mission accomplished.

It’s those sudden, inexplicable breakthroughs, those little lightning strikes of inspiration, that this compilation is ultimately concerned with. And it’s in those moments when these crappily-recorded fumblings become a source of real fascination.

A haunted, husky-voiced cover of the Lennon/McCartney classic And I Love Her is another highlight, invoking the naked beauty of Nirvana’s 1993 Unplugged session. But these are rare meaty morsels in a musical slop bucket of scraps. At best, Montage Of Heck is an ideal Christmas present for the most undemanding of Cobain completists. At worst, a barrel-scraping cash-in that demeans his legacy.

It's hard to imagine even hardcore fans listening to this twice, as it sounds too much like an empty barrel being scraped. [Jan 2016, p.106]

Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.

[Do Re Mi] is beautiful and it’s one of a scant handful of moments on Montage of Heck that anyone other than a Cobain obsessive might conceivably play more than once: proof that, even at the bottom of the barrel, you can occasionally scrape up something of interest.

Listening to the man find his voice is the only “thrill” here, as familiar (if hardly marquee-level) Nirvana staples like “Been a Son,” “Scoff,” “Sappy,” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” all appear sans finished lyrics, or sung in too-high or too-low range-testing cadences like a very bored kid performing for a live studio audience of stuffed animals.

The Home Recordings largely serve as a further step back along the creative path, to a point where we either see songs at their most infantile stage or at a crossroads where Cobain, the tireless perfectionist, probably realised he could take them no further.

Most of it might fascinate for a listen or two, but presenting this as new work at top-end retail prices is the type of barrel-scraping exploitation that would've made the ever-wary Cobain retch.

Vinyl is not a good format for Montage of Heck, an album that requires a fair amount of skipping around just to qualify as tolerable. I’m using the word “album” loosely here, because this one fails as an album in almost every conceivable way, jettisoning any sense of unity or context in favor of positioning itself as an aural complement to Morgen’s documentary.