Review: Vinyl Reissued of 3 Hole Albums

I can't think of a band that arrived with more baggage than Hole. By the time they released their first album in 1991, Courtney Love was already partnered with the biggest star of the barely-there-yet alternative revolution. Her explosive personality was all over MTV, and her myriad controversies were about to turn Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair into The National Enquirer. 

All this Love made it hard to take Hole's music at face value. That may have actually been a boon for Pretty On the Inside, which is way too abrasive and tuneless to get much traction on its own merits outside of the hardest of hardcore grunge puppies. I also can't think of another debut album by a pretty popular band that is so hard to listen to, with only the somewhat garagey "Loaded" and somewhat psychedelic "Clouds" having enough distinctive personality to rise above their own lack of melodies. Pretty On the Inside makes Bleach sound like Meet the Beatles. 

Courtney Love still wasn't quite yet COURTNEY LOVE when Pretty on the Inside was released in late 1991. She had a lot more to prove by early 1994 when Live Through This came out, since she was a huge star by then but one without any significant artistic statements to measure her hugeness against. 

Tragically, Live Through This came out exactly one week after Kurt Cobain's suicide, making Hole's second album even harder to judge on its own merits. This is unfair to an excellent album that didn't need any baggage to distinguish it, yet that baggage does heighten the richness and poignancy of Live Through This. It's nearly impossible to hear Love's screams of "go on take everything" and not think she was screaming as much for herself as she was for her partner who was still alive when she'd written it. 

Through Live Through This, Love and her cohort Eric Erlandson turned out strong songs and the band forged a sad yet decadent atmosphere worthy of the Stones' "Sister Morphine". If all the shouts of "fuck you" even seemed a bit hackneyed in '94, material such as "Plump", "Asking For It", "Jennifer's Body", the pretty "Softer, Softest", the truly awesome "Credit in the Straight World", and the great singles "Violet" and "Doll Parts" are as lyrically and musically compelling as the best nineties alternative rock, which is saying a hell of a lot.

Four years beyond the tragedy of her husband's death and the triumph of a terrific album, Courtney Love seemed to be bouncing back from the abyss. She'd recently come off a well-received performance in Milos Forman's film The People Vs. Larry Flint, she glammed up her sound, and she and Erlandson rebuilt Hole yet again and wrote a vengefully melodious selection of songs. There was not a trace of the sonic abrasiveness of Pretty On the Inside on Celebrity Skin. Yet even with the burnt-LA sunset glow of "Awful" and "Malibu", there is a troubling sense of loss rather than rejuvenation, imbuing what could have been just a tuneful and jangly power pop album with emotional gravity. Celebrity Skin is definitely slick when compared to Pretty On the Inside or even Live Through This, but not really when compared to ragged stuff like Tim or Let It Be (not The Beatles one!). It'll only feel like a soft compromise if you're completely pop-averse, and if you are, I feel sorry for you . 

Hole's nineties output is now coming back to vinyl. Each record arrived with some scuffs and dirt and audible ticks, the most persistent being on Live Through This. That record also has some intermittent sibilance, but overall it sounds dynamic with good bass and clarity. Fifty minutes of Celebrity Skin crammed onto a single LP results in quieter less dynamic sound, but this disc was the cleanest, with the least amount of surface noise and no sibilance whatsoever. My copy has a slight wave that does not affect play at all. 

Each album includes reproductions of its CD art, whether in a booklet like the one included with Live Through This or on the printed inners included with Pretty on the Inside and Celebrity Skin.