Although Nobody’s Daughter is labeled a Hole LP, it is mostly the work of band co-founder Courtney Love and the veteran artists she recruited for collaborations.
Courtney Love certainly is a character, well-known as the feisty widow of late 1990s rock god Kurt Cobain. But who else is Love? Sure, she’s had her hits here and there with her band Hole, but in total, she’s famed more for her reported drug addictions and highly publicized legal disputes.
What most people seem to forget is that Love is a relatively good songwriter, regardless of her malfeasances. With her latest LP, Nobody’s Daughter, Love brings her listeners a string of somewhat depressed, post-rehab compositions that are consistently more introspectively affective than hard rocking.
The record seems like a Love solo project, but it is actually being released under the moniker of her longtime band, Hole. Hole co-founder and lead guitarist Eric Erlandson is nowhere to be found on the new record, and the new music itself doesn’t quite reflect the often heavier, more dissonant sound of the original Hole. Furthermore, although Love is credited on all but one of the tracks as a songwriter, many of these same songs are also written by 4 Non Blondes frontwoman Linda Perry and Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.
The change in sound is unmistakable. Whereas older Hole songs may have been built on fuzz guitar chops, new tracks such as “For Once in Your Life” feature sweeping string sections over painfully strummed acoustic guitars. Clean electric guitars hang in the back of the mix with light percussion, sparkling endlessly and letting Love’s distinctively thin, shattered voice come to the front.
In a sense, the whole album — pardon the pun — is a look at a shattered Love. In recent years, Love has battled drug addiction, eating disorder accusations and the loss of custody of her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.
With all these stressors, not to mention a public that is unendingly interested in her slow downfall, it’s no wonder that the tone and lyrics of her new album are so gloomy. Take the album’s title track, where Love sings, “You don’t understand how damaged we really are / You don’t understand how evil we really are / And I will dig my own grave.” Strangely enough, the song is a stylistic mixed bag, somewhere between alternative country and soft rock.
Most importantly, nothing on the album sounds recent. Instead, the music is relative to Love as a musician who came of age in the 1990s. Perhaps Love is using music to reflect on a time in her life that was arguably better and easier.
But no matter her motives, the decision to not conform to today’s rock standards is a perfect move, making her sound entirely different than the rest of her competition. “Honey” is a sad, yet undeniably catchy mid-tempo track that builds to emotional heights rarely visited by Love. Her visceral scream at the peak of the song’s crescendo may have listeners surprised by the level of enjoyment they are receiving from a Love song.
“Pacific Coast Highway” finds Love on the road, singing about loving the wrong man and presumably killing him with his own gun. Again, huge country rock chords power the track, and Love’s voice lays down multiple memorable melodies that should please the even the most jaded of rock listeners.
A few of the songs do reflect a harder rocking Love, but these are few and far between. First single “Skinny Little Bitch” is a straight-ahead rock number, sounding like a lost recording from the mid-1990s. The song is interesting mostly because it is the first single and therefore has a predetermined memorable quality.
However, the other hard rock songs on the LP seem out place. “Loser Dust” is as close to punk as Love has ever been, but that distinction doesn’t make the song any better. It’s absolutely forgettable and doesn’t give listeners much reason to try to return to it for a second listen. There are plenty of other songs on the album worth replaying, just representing sounds that Love has not explored quite so deeply before, and so listeners may at first be confused by the alteration in style.
At this point in her career, it’s fallen out of vogue to accuse Love of conspiring to kill Kurt Cobain, but plenty of listeners may simply be too overwhelmed by their essentially pointless hatred of Love to allow themselves to pick up the album. For everyone else, Nobody’s Daughter is worth a listen, not as a way to look at Love, but as a way to look at the world through Love’s eyes.
RATING: 3 stars out of 5
diversions@umdbk.com
