Hole - Nobody's Daughter

After a 12-year hiatus from their last release, Hole are back with fourth album Nobody’s Daughter. Although lead singer Courtney Love has somewhat become the Miss Havisham figure of the rock world, it does well to remember that she was an unstoppable force in the nineties producing two of the best rock albums of that decade (Live Through This and Celebrity Skin). However, the fact that she is the only original member left in the group, essentially making this a solo album in the wake of the flop that was American Sweetheart, is there any way that the genius of Hole can be resurrected?

With the recruiting of the same producers who worked their magic on the pop-rock masterpiece Celebrity Skin and the song writing talent of Linda Perry, there is no doubt that there was some degree of measured excitement that Nobody’s Daughter could undo a lot of damage from the last 12 years of ‘legal issues’. These feelings were raised to slightly below fever point with the stunning eponymous opener which, although bearing a similarity to ‘Hit So Hard’ from a previous album, assuaged all fears of this turning into a cop-out record. This was then followed by a very PJ Harvey sounding song in the form of ‘Skinny Little Bitch’ which makes heavy use of the trademark Courtney Love scowl. It was in this song however that one problem was noticed, Love’s voice.

12 years is a long time in the music business, a time that is exponentially longer when you throw in a life of drink, drugs and shouting matches with Lindsay Lohan. Her voice is a lot weaker than it used to be and as such the harsher, and somehow most aesthetically pleasing, tones of her rock voice have been sanded down. This is evident in third track where her voice sounds so slurred that ‘Honey’ could be a guide to beekeeping with intersperses of ‘he goes down’ and we would be none the wiser. That said, the music itself is awesome.

With the exception of ‘Honey’ the first half of Nobody’s Daughter is the rock record that most of us had hoped for and it makes for a satisfactory conclusion to the much maligned Hole-brand. However, we then reach the second Linda Perry infused section of the album and everything just goes down the toilet. Song after song is a profound disappointment culminating in the single ‘Letter To God’, reportedly the attempt to create a song like Christina Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful’ suited for Love, but instead it comes off as so self-pitying that the meanest amongst us may feel tempted to hand Love the razorblade just to stop whining.

Despite a very promising opening group of songs, the decline of quality of Nobody’s Daughter makes this a profoundly average album that should have been released as a six-track EP containing the opening five tracks and the closer ‘Never Go Hungry’ rather than a whole album. This does show that once Love surrounds herself with the right producers and ditches the Linda Perry ballads there could be a great album in her screaming to get out, just not right now.

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