Bleach Review

The famous detail, that the whole thing cost about six hundred dollars, is not just trivia. It explains the sound: one guitar tone, drums recorded in a corner, everything mid range and thick, no room to separate anything. That suits some of it. School is two riffs and fifteen words and works exactly as intended. Negative Creep and Paper Cuts are genuinely oppressive. But a lot of this is a young band doing a very good impression of the local heavy scene rather than sounding like itself, and the writing is generic in a way nothing after it is.

The vocals are buried, the lyrics are mostly texture, and by the second half the riffs start to repeat. Then About a Girl arrives, a two minute pop song with a proper melody and a bridge, recorded almost apologetically, and it is obvious in hindsight that this was the real writer showing his hand. A decent record from a band that had not yet decided to be good at what it was actually good at.