Album review: Hole, 'Nobody's Daughter'
Courtney Love’s latest comeback began in 2005, when she began writing songs on an acoustic guitar while in a rehab clinic. Five years later, the fourth Hole album is finally out, Love’s new claim for musical relevance after a decade of misadventure.
Too bad “Nobody’s Daughter” (Mercury/Island Def Jam) presents Love striving for competence, a dull professionalism that she once despised.
In 2004, Love billed herself, with no small irony, as “America’s Sweetheart” – the title of her first and only solo album. The album bombed, and even Love now considers it an artistic disaster. As train wrecks go, it was a doozey, a snapshot of a life besieged by drug abuse and child custody fights.
But Love teetering on train-wreck territory is part of her appeal as a rock star. She may not be much of a songwriter, but she sure does know how to own a stage, to prop a stiletto heel on a monitor and command attention. Unfortunately, “Nobody’s Daughter” presents exactly one song that embodies that energy, the howling “How Dirty Girls Get Clean.”
On “Live Through This,” the 1994 album that remains Hole’s crowning achievement, Love took on a procession of female stereotypes and worked them over with a mixture of bravado and vulnerability. The events surrounding the album’s release – most notably the suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain – gave many of the songs a tragic context that only magnified their emotional intensity.
“Nobody’s Daughter” aims for a similar kick-in-the-gut drama, a portrait of the fallen rock star surveying the ruins. There are bitter songs about her estranged mother and Cobain, self-pitying ones about her troubles with drug addiction, and finger-pointing rants at friends or lovers who have done her wrong. Love at her conflicted best can veer from a whisper to a wail with hair-raising conviction.
But the Hollywood pros she enlisted to help her – songwriters Linda Perry and Billy Corgan (moonlighting from the Smashing Pumpkins), producer Michael Beinhorn – sand down her rough edges and turn “Nobody’s Daughter” into a dreary piece of middle-of-the-road product. Instead of amplifying Love’s volatility, they turn her into a domesticated folk-rocker.
Love’s voice has the texture of sandpaper, as if she were recorded after one too many sleepless nights. She compensates with an odd Bob Dylan impersonation, complete with a sneering nasal twang. A gloomy solipsism prevails on the title track, “Honey,” “Pacific Coast Highway” and especially “Letter to God.”
“I’ve been tortured and scorned since the day I was born,” she sings on the latter, a theme reiterated all too often on this album. It’s a power-ballad arrangement worthy of a third-rate Sunset Strip hair-metal band, not a room-wrecking femme fatale intent on reminding her fans of why they cared about her in the first place.
greg@gregkot.com
Nothing will ever top the song "Violet" which I was just compelled to buy in the midst of reading your review. I've got chills; it's amazing what this woman could sound like. I don't think that she will ever be able to recapture the rage and rawness she once had.
Posted by: Jennifer | April 22, 2010 at 03:04 PM
I will always admire Courtney Love as a public figure. She has been the victim of counter-feminism. Feminists don't like her because once she decided to flirt with hollywood and hollywood doesn't want her because she's not "glamourous enough", however, she has always been authentic. You are right about her album, it's toned down, almost sentimental and cliched, like she was trying to please someone, but she is still a rockstar.
Posted by: Automedusa | April 22, 2010 at 03:24 PM
I bed to disagree with your review. I just love this album. Maybe I have different taste in music than you do. I like more polished pop things, not mindless screaming and thrashing. Dirty Girls Get Clean which this reviewer like is my least favorite song on the album.
Sometimes music critics don't let artists grow and change. They always want them to make the same kind of music as when they first started instead of listening to each record individually without preconceptions of what it should sound like.
You can't expect her to be the same as she was in the nineties, but she has made an incredibly accomplished well constructed pop/rock record. Listen to it for what it is not what you want it to be.
Posted by: Glinda | April 22, 2010 at 04:43 PM
she's 45 years old now. i think she's allowed to tone it down a bit
Posted by: turniponionparsnip@gmail.com | April 22, 2010 at 04:51 PM
This review misses the mark completely. Nobody's Daughter started out life as what you call a folk album. Live Through This was released 16 years ago, and we still have to compare everything she does to it? Grunge is dead. Live Through This Part II isn't going to happen. There was always a lot more to Courtney's music than that. You are talking about a woman who worships Echo and the Bunnymen and Fleetwood Mac, and who has been making what you would call "professional" pop music since Celebrity Skin. And the fact that you call How Dirty Girls Get Clean the highlight of the album shows that you really have no idea about Courtney's music at all, and that makes your "review" essentially pointless.
Posted by: Michael | April 22, 2010 at 05:09 PM
Her only good songs were written with or by other people.
As w/ many this is true, who cares? Let the Hole lovers be, Hole lovers let others have an opinion..we all have one...like bodily orifices, and your's works the same as mine...(need I finish it to drive the point home?) for waste...
All after pretty on the inside is dreck anyway....see that's my opinion...
Posted by: staggerlee | April 23, 2010 at 12:33 PM
I have only heard one song on this album (I think "Skinny Little Bitch"), and I forgot what it sounded like immediately, because it blurred and disappeared into the average Alternative Rock Song prototype that my brain created (as a defense mechanism I'm sure) about 15 years ago. I agree with Kot; someone who wrote "Live Through This" and "Pretty on the Inside" should be able to do better. Celebrity Skin was awful, America's Sweetheart was awful. It's not that I'm expecting her to stay in the same style of the earlier albums, just to maintain some of the honesty and toughness that made her my personal teen hero. She could do an acoustic album or a polka album for all I care as long as it was real. I mean, if that was real, it shouldn't be this hard to hold on to, right?
@automedusa: I never met a feminist that "didn't like" Love b/c of her foray into Hollywood.
Posted by: radiosantoni | April 23, 2010 at 04:57 PM
I can't decide if her best song ever is "Violet" or "Mono". Both rank as two of the best hard rock, kick-you-in-the-a$$ songs ever -- male or female.
Posted by: J.S. | April 23, 2010 at 07:59 PM
all of her albums are great actually even america's sweetheart is great//i dunno why she trashes it it 's a great album...this one is perfect i really don't get what the reviewers problem with this one is...the title song nobody's daughter actually made me cry and gave me shivers all over i think it's probably the best song on this album honey is aclosed second....how dirty girls get clean is also my least favourite....of the punk rock songs my favorite ona is loser dust it's just so fun....the only problem i had with it is the way her voice sounds on for once in your life..it sounds almost cartoosh kind of overproduced but the song is great and it sounds perfect live.....the album is very talanted..... she's 45 now she deserves to be mature
Posted by: liz lemon | April 24, 2010 at 03:15 PM
I couldn't disagree more. This album is AMAZING! I think its the strongest stuff Courtney Love has churned out in forever. (And I actually lied her solo album). Don't listen to this bad review - if you were a fan of hole, are a fan of courtney, love rock = you will LOVE Nobody's Daughter.
This album is a 5 star perfect album.
I couldn't be happier because I think Love deserves some positive attention.
Posted by: Casey Chapman | April 28, 2010 at 12:56 PM