Pop Music Reviews : Punk-Rock Heaven From Northwest’s Nirvana

In his book “Lipstick Traces,” semiotician Greil Marcus says something to the effect that any great punk song can sound like the best song you’ve heard before in your life.

At Raji’s on Thursday, Nirvana, a noisy power-trio from suburban Washington State, sounded for the moment at least like the best punk band you’ve heard in your life: deep-deep metal riffs repeated as relentlessly as beats on a hip-hop record, washes of guitar white noise, singer Kurdt Kobain bellowing punk koans above the din. Sample lyric: “I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep. . . .” The bottom grabbed your guts in a way you may not have experienced since the Germs broke up. And some of the crowd was actually pogoing.

Nirvana, the newest poster boys from Seattle’s white-hot Sub Pop Records stable, are masters of that sort of anarchic hard-rock fullness you might associate with Jimi Hendrix. That’s for half the set. The other half, neo-psychedelic ditties roughly structured like Seeds songs or something, seems thrown in the way the Kronos Quartet will toss in some Bartok or a nouvelle French chef will sometimes serve you a pot-au-feu , just to let you know that they can work in a classical vein if they want to. But Nirvana doesn’t work as well as adenoidal teen heroes--you can hear all the words, for one thing.