Over the last two years, Richmond, Virginia’s Robotic Empire has released a pair of Nirvana tribute compilations on Record Store Day. Each one has seen one of Nirvana’s iconic albums covered in full, with bands from the worlds of punk, metal, and hardcore twisting Kurt Cobain’s distinctive voice into something new. This year, Robotic Empire is completing the trilogy by releasing Doused In Mud, Soaked In Bleach, which sees bands like Beach Slang, Thou, Rob Crow’s Gloomy Place, and more tackling songs from Nirvana’s 1989 debut album Bleach. Today, The A.V. Club is streaming Basement’s cover of “School,” which sees the band from Ipswich, England staying close to Nirvana’s original without merely regurgitating the source material. Of its cover, Basement vocalist Andrew Fisher says:
We picked “School” because it’s really heavy and so simple but so good. It has two parts the whole way through. Just goes to show how dynamics can make a song interesting. Whenever we play it I wish we wrote it because it’s that good. We flirted with the idea of trying to make it “our own” and change it, but because the song is so simple everything we came up with sounded forced and wrong. Instead we thought we’d try our best to do the song justice and so recorded it live and tried to keep it as true to the original as possible. I think it came out pretty cool.
Doused In Mud, Soaked In Bleach
1. Defeater, “Blew”
2. Thou, “Floyd the Barber”
3. Beach Slang, “About a Girl”
4. Basement, “School”
5. Circa Survive, “Love Buzz”
6. This Will Destroy You, “Paper Cuts”
7. Young Widows, “Negative Creep”
8. Mean Jeans, “Scoff”
9. Rob Crow’s Gloomy Place, “Swap Meet”
10. The Fall of Troy, “Mr. Moustache”
11. Big Hush, “Sifting”
12. Daughters, “Big Cheese”
13. The Saddest Landscape, “Downer”