For girls who came of age in the mid-1990s, streaked their hair with Manic Panic, accessorized baby-doll dresses with combat boots and thrift-store cardigans, and crammed dog-eared copies of Sassy into each others' lockers, Courtney Love can feel like something of a pet cause. In 1994, Live Through This, Hole's second LP-- released, famously, in the wake of Kurt Cobain's suicide, after Love spent the weekend tottering through a vigil in a Seattle Center park-- was transformative, instructive, and beloved. That harsh, throaty gasp at the end of "Violet" was so authentically exhausted it felt like a promise: I'm giving you all I've got. We took it.
In the years since, Love has become less a savior than a punchline, an egomaniacal eccentric who seems to invite tabloid bullshit: the incoherent twittering, the inexplicable brawls (squabbling with Lily Allen about who gets to wear a dress?), the bizarre Facebook apology to Billy Corgan. Sadly, Love's public persona has colored her music for just about everyone-- especially since her celebrity has been so pivotal (and purposeful) in the promotion of her work. Part of Love's appeal is her bravado, and she does her savvy best to substantiate it for us. That she fails, that we cringe, or that any of us still care are all valid lenses; they were provided by Love herself.
The turmoil of the past few years gave fans a reason to hope that Nobody's Daughter might match the vulnerability of Live Through This, reviving the inside-out mania that energized Love's best tracks. What we've gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on-- despite her public meltdowns, Love remains preoccupied with posture and pose. She's buried, hiding behind a deliberate holler and dopey choruses, compulsively over-singing without ever saying much. Is it greedy to want Love's wildness-- all that vanity and fury and humor and trauma-- to animate her music? What are we allowed to demand from Courtney Love? More than this. Nobody's Daughter is heartbreakingly banal.
This is Hole's fourth record, but that designation feels like a technicality-- there's not much to distinguish it from Love's solo work. Of course, Hole has always been something of a rotating ensemble, but it was anchored by a partnership between Love and guitarist Eric Erlandson, who is notably absent. There are a few oddball credits (Martha Wainwright, pianist Thomas Bartlett aka Doveman, and John Zorn-collaborating cellist Erik Friedlander all appear), and an employed cabal of co-writers, including Linda Perry, guitarist Pete Thorn, and Corgan.
Some tracks, like the Hole/Corgan/Perry collaboration "Pacific Coast Highway" (which nods to Celebrity Skin's "Malibu", in both content and style), show hints of earnestness: "I'm overwrought and so disgraced/ I'm too ashamed to show my face," Love sings, her voice cracking over pristine guitar. Later, things get mucked up by an unnecessary solo (by Hole's new lead guitarist, 24-year old Micko Larkin), but it's enough of a window to make listeners question what these songs might have done had they not been filtered through years of overwrites and third-party input. Same goes for "Letter to God", which suffers from a silly conceit, but offers moments of genuine humility ("I never wanted to be/ Some kind of comic relief/ Please show me who I am.")
Love's voice is garbled and withering, and there are times, as on "Someone Else's Bed", where her voice sounds uncomfortably like Bob Dylan's. But the guitars are so dated, raunchy, and overstated that every track starts to feel like cartoon-rock-- more a Sunset Strip-rehash than grunge nostalgia, even-- and Love's lyrics ("I'm a lost soooooul!") are plastic and artless. Despite its few fleeting moments of honesty, Nobody's Daughter ultimately feels like a badly missed opportunity.
