Hole: Nobody’s Daughter

Hole

Label: Mercury Records

Mention Courtney Love in mixed company and nine times out of 10 you will elicit a huff, eye roll or gag reflex. And yeah, there is so much awful: a recent restraining order prohibiting her from contact with her daddy-eyed daughter Frances Bean, a defamation action over terroristic tweets to an Etsy designer who dared cross her (the first Twitter lawsuit of its kind – congrats!), the ever-present pissing matches with Dave Grohl and reels and reels’ worth of assorted make-outs, freak-outs, wash-outs and wipe-outs shot by the opportunistic wasteoids at TMZ. Courtney does herself no favors. But here’s some advice: Don’t let these unfashionable disasters poison the well for Nobody’s Daughter. It’s not a referendum. Don’t bring that shit when you spin the album.

For a long time, no one knew the whereabouts of Nobody’s Daughter. It had been in production for about 100 years, or, to be more precise, since 2005. Songs – and there were lots of them – were leaked. Then retooled. Then axed from the final track list. Release dates came and went- arbitrarily, it seemed. Billy Corgan and Linda Perry, both co-writers and collaborators, pimped and primped Courtney but in the end, have declined parentage of the project, the churlish Pumpkin going so far to say, “I have no interest in supporting her in any way, shape or form. You can’t throw enough things down the abyss with a person like that.” Which brings us to now- when the album actually is here and the reception feels much like a belated birthday gift that we’re excited to open yet kinda pissed about, since it’s postmarked so late.

Nobody’s Daughter is not Live Through This. Nothing ever will be. No one should have expected that. The good news is that it’s not America’s Sweetheart, a likelier outcome. What we do have in Nobody’s Daughter is something that aches to be lovingly nihilistic and viscerally redemptive but labors under too many burdens (overproduction, vocal weirdness, stiffly written solos) to be anything more than an honorable albeit long-suffering attempt to return to grace.

It’s like that nursery rhyme about the little girl with the little curl: “When she was good she was very, very good but when she was bad she was horrid.” The very, very good parts of Nobody’s Daughter are the tracks that sound most expected. Maybe it’s not cool or forward-thinking to crack out on nostalgia, but when you’re Courtney Love ™, there’s something that pays off about being true to type. “Skinny Little Bitch” is vintage Hole, that alpha-female snarl so gratifying it provokes a wicked smile of recognition among even the most peripheral of fans. Listeners barely leave the song alive as Courtney vows, “You will never see the light/ I’ll just obscure it out of spite.” There’s a chaotic acceleration under the call-out of feral screams; she is chasing you down and grabbing you by the hair – meanwhile, right now somewhere Kathleen Hanna is downing a fistful of Ativan. “Samantha” (this album’s lesser “Violet”), with its dirty daisychain mantra of “People like you fuck people like me fuck people like you…” recalls Courtney’s talent for poetical gutterspeak and supports the value of the Corgan lovefest while “Pacific Coast Highway,” in many ways a doppelganger of Celebrity Skin material, approaches the beautifully tragic, featuring a pretty little modulation that almost distracts us from sorely missing Melissa Auf der Maur’s temperate back-up. Rounding out the winners is “Loser Dust,” an accessible bounce-punk anthem that might well serve as a gateway song to a new generation of mini-fems. Which begs the question, Is Hole the best place for them to go?

Nobody’s Daughter gets a little horrid right in its tangled center. “Someone Else’s Bed,” “For Once in Your Life” and “Letter to God” make for a rat’s nest of emotional claptrap that should have stayed cloistered in the rehab writing circle. Or, more to the point, if they do live to see the light of day, stop messing with them – adding superfluous strings and such – for production’s sake. In these slower tunes (and there are too many packed in too closely), Love experiments with vocal and enunciative trickery, eliciting comparisons to everyone from Bob Dylan to Stevie Nicks to, most annoyingly of all, Linda Perry herself (remember that spectacularly terrible Four Non-Blondes song? That was her fault). These affectations, reptilian to the ear, drop in and out and in the end just add more litter to an already compromised landscape.

Time will tell what the point of all of this is: Is Nobody’s Daughter a revival? A commercial? A semi-lucid moment? A narcissistic grab for relevancy? The answer here is probably a simple “yes.” Kinderwhore may be so over, but Courtney’s not done. The lyrics are not as pathologically cagey, the refrains not streaming with sour milk, but neither is this record an abject failure. Nobody’s Daughter is a wobbly step towards the light. Courtney, next time ditch the hacks and don’t overthink it. Like any reconstruction, these things are built brick by brick. And as any battle-tested riot-grrrl worth her salt can tell you: bricks are heavy.

by Stacey Pavlick