Product Description

Final studio album from the seminal grunge band, who chose alternative noise guru Steve Albini as producer. Raw blasts of distortion sit alongside some of Kurt Cobain's most bleakand beautiful songs. 'In Utero' includes the singles 'HeartShaped Box' and 'All Apologies'.

Track Listing

1. Serve The Servants
2. Scentless Apprentice
3. Heart Shaped Box
4. Rape Me
5. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle
6. Dumb
7. Very Ape
8. Milk It
9. Pennyroyal Tea
10. Radio Friendly Unit Shifter
11. Tourette's
12. All Apologies/Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2048 in Music
• Released on: 1993-09-01
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 49 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Overwhelmed by sudden success, Nirvana promised to take a harsher, more abrasive route on their second major-label release. Enlisting Chicago-based noise maven Steve Albini (of Big Black fame), Kurt Cobain and company succeeded in producing a record that was violent, disillusioned, and deeply moving. Every song reads like a commentary on the cost of fame ("Serve the Servants") and the unhealthy relationship between performer and fan ("Milk It"). Of course, they might all simply be about Courtney Love. Gossip aside, there is no denying the sheer power of Cobain's song-writing, his singing, and the band's amazing, visceral power. Cobain even manages a John Lennon-like mantra at the end of the heart-wrenching "All Apologies". "All in all is all we are," he intones repeatedly, only for Cobain that's no consolation. --Percy Keegan

Customer Reviews

Mostly unlistenable...
Mostly unlistenable poor little popular rich kid angst/complaint rock - very poor - rape me is good mind

Excellent, Just As Good As NEVERMIND
This album is quite different to Nevermind. It is more gritty and less mainstream. Each song has a distorted sound to it but this album is still just as enjoyable as Nevermind is. It is less mainstream, more shouty and screamy and no polish is to be found anywhere on this album.

The best song on the album is 'Milk It'. With the awesome shout-along chorus to the excellent guitar rift the song is this albums 'Smells Like teen Spirit'. Just more gritty. The song is just amazing! I cannot get it out of my head and I am listening to it as I write this review.

'Heart Shaped box' is an excellent song with another excellent chrous. This song is so good because the song has multiple meanings. You can intepret it in anyway you want. It's the same as lots of Nirvana songs - they are very well written. It is probably the reason why Nirvana are so well-known.

This album is just as good as nevermind(If not better)so give it a go, I'm sure you'll LOVE it. :)

what a record.
We bought a new stereo in August. It's well good. I like how, when you buy a new stereo that sounds great, you keep thinking of old records from your collection and wondering how they will sound on your new system. The latest record to be put to the test was Nirvana's "In Utero". To be honest, I don't think I've listened to it for about four years, but it dates right back to when I really started my record collection.

I heard "Nevermind" when it came out, but to be honest, I didn't get it. It seemed really two dimensional to me. It actually took Kurt Cobain's untimely death to make me sit up and listen - in fact, that seemed to be the case for most people at my school who became massive Nirvana fans.

If I remember the sequence of events correctly, I heard Heart-Shaped Box on "Noisy Mothers," a late night heavy metal show I used to watch. I think it was shown as a tribute to Kurt, and I loved it. The next day I managed to borrow a copy of "In Utero", and for some reason it shook my world to the ground immediately. It became of those records that I would just listen to all the time.

So obviously I stopped listening to it a few years ago. You do move on to other things, and sometimes you forget about these records, sometimes you simply pass them over. Sometimes - like in the case of Nirvana - the hype and resultant popularity seems to take all the pleasure out of the music you like. I would never deny the quality of "In Utero" though. It's just that it was nigh on time for a reappraisal.

Well on Friday night it got that reappraisal. And my verdict is: what a record! It's amazing! For all your debates about other alt. rock/grunge bands and how much better they actually are than Nirvana, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah... it's really nonsense. As good as all these other bands were, "In Utero" is an absolute classic. No other band has dared to make a record that sounds like it since. It's just HUGE. It's abrasive, muscular, multi-layered and powerfully emotional. And it's all over in around 30 minutes.

Back in the late 90s a friend of mine told me about an argument he'd had at a party. His friend had claimed that John Lennon was the greatest loss to music. My friend, and this surprised me given his eclectic musical tastes, insisted that the greatest loss was Kurt Cobain ( I might actually say Jeff Buckley). My friend's reason was that Lennon had already done all his best work, and was well on the way down creatively when he was killed. Kurt Cobain on the other hand had just recorded his greatest work, a record that I would actually say is underrated, and was surely on the brink of taking the next evolutionary step (in musical terms).

None of us can really say where Kurt would have taken the band next, or whether he might have gone solo. The posthumous release, "You Know You're Right" isn't really anything to go by. I'll tell you though what I would have liked to have seen. I would have liked an entire album of music along the lines of the "Nevermind" and "In Utero" bonus tracks: "Endless Nameless" and "Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip". Particularly the latter of those two is fantastic in my opinion, and I rue the decision that placed it 24 minutes of digital silence after the beginning of All Apologies. If only it could have been track 13...

Just like Nirvana showed a radical and original side on the "Insesticide" compilation, I think a whole album of paranoid noise-scape music (or "para-noise-scape" music) like those bonus tracks would have been fascinating and enormously affecting emotionally. And it would have been the next big challenge to alternative rock and Nirvana's own fans.

Sadly there's no chance of any such thing coming from Kurt. So it's up to someone else to go there. I don't really want to do it - I'm on a blues rock kick at the moment - but hopefully some worthy soul will take up that gauntlet. I'll be keeping an ear out.