Nirvana – With The Lights Out

I’d like to see a vinyl release of this. If they can do an 8LP deluxe version of Nevermind that is mostly just live shows I don’t see why an LP release of this isn’t happening

Come on need a merge here the two US sets are the same thing

My copy matches the catalog number but not the stated UPC. Mine has 075021030695.

Don't waste your time or money! This is the type of garbage put out for suckers with a weird compulsion to collect everything Nirvana.

I wish they would release this as a vinyl box set. Make it happen Geffen!!

'They Hung Him On A Cross' and 'Ain't It A Shame' are good songs. KC was too funny.

Somehow I got a copy with the US code on the box spine and the Europe code on the back sticker. As all cd's and DVD say "made in the EU" I'll put mine as European. Beware...

Courtney battles the bootleggers to protect her pension
With 61 tracks over three CDs, and another 20 on the DVD, the $60 "With The Lights Out" boxed-set promised to be a deep treasure chest of unreleased Nirvana booty. But just ten caught my ear for being both rare and decent: "Verse Chorus Verse", "Talk To Me", "Sappy", "Oh The Guilt" and "Old Age" (originally a Hole B-side) are great additions to the Nirvana canon, "Opinion" and "Do Re Mi" are acoustic demos with huge potential, and "D-7", "Return Of The Rat" (both written by Wipers) and "Here She Comes Now" (written by The Velvet Underground) are good cover versions.

With five of these tracks also featuring on "Sliver: The Best Of The Box", this leaves just "Verse Chorus Verse", "Talk To Me" and the three covers as decent tracks "unique" to this release. And sadly, the remaining 51 audio tracks are either weak demos that never made it, poor quality covers, previously released B-sides, or demo / live versions of tracks that were already easily available on other official releases in similar or better musical form.

The DVD contains live recordings of often poor sound quality that do not add much to Nirvana's musical legacy (aside from the aforementioned "Talk To Me"). Much better live Nirvana could already be found on "Live Tonight, Sold Out", "From the Muddy Banks of the Wiskaw", the B-sides of several singles, and on the subsequently released "Live At Reading".

The packaging rescues the release to a certain extent. The booklet provides an illustrated background to the three CDs, personal recollections of the band from Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, and a well-written but vaguely-related history lesson by journalist Neil Strauss that ends with Nirvana as kings of the "fourth wave of punk". The metallic cover art is extravagant but pretty.

In conclusion, "With The Lights Out" is more like a lavish jewellery box that contains a few hidden gems in a heap of battered costume jewellery. A more appropriate self-referential title might have been "Milk It", and I wonder how the perfectionist and anti-capitalist Kurt Cobain would have felt about his off-cuts being released so exorbitantly. But then, a lot of liberties can get taken with the lights out. (6)