Hole Joins The Club

There’s been some talk around here about the 90s reunion phenomenon. There’s certainly a lot to discuss- Who do we wish would? Who do we wish hadn’t? When is it wrong, when is it right? And who the fuck are we to judge anyway?

For better or worse, there’s a new one for the list. In an exclusive new two-part on-camera interview with NME published this week, Courtney Love has announced that Nobody’s Daughter, the solo the album she’s been working on for years, is finally totally coming soon, and it’s actually going to be a new Hole album. Melissa Auf Der Maur is returning to the fold, while a well-hyped newcomer named Micko Larkin has replaced Eric Erlandson. No word yet on a drummer, but we promise to care if Courtney gets Samantha Maloney back on board.

As usual, I’ve got mixed feelings about this one. Hole was a good band, a taste for Courtney’s vocal style notwithstanding, and their growth over only three albums was remarkable. Their wild trajectory from trash can punk through flannel-clad angst-mongers to polished pop-rock debutantes would have put them somewhere really interesting by now had they never broken up. It could be really interesting to hear what they’ve become after ten years.

On the other hand, I caught Courtney live about a year ago when she hopped onstage at Linda Perry’s show at the House Of Blues to play a few songs- all from Nobody’s Daughter- and found it to be an abysmally low point of the evening in comparison to Linda’s truly amazing, super-rare performance. Since then I’ve managed to get my hands on rough studio versions of those songs as well as four or five others, and sadly, none of them blew me away.

In the second part of NME’s video, Courtney and Micko treat us to clips of what NME claims is a contender for the “big” single, the lyrically vicious Samantha (hopefully not about Maloney), as well as of the track Nobody’s Daughter:

Courtney’s vocals are a bit rough around the edges, even for her, and maybe a little too loud in the mix. While there’s nothing spectacular going on in Samantha, the title track is promising, and quite a bit different than the version she performed in front of me last year. Granted, this music as we’re hearing it has surely been thinned out quite a bit by the interviewer’s camera mic, so there could be a lot of good and bad lost in translation.

I get the impression that artistic differences (assumably respectful) between Courtney and Linda Perry have something to do with both the amount of time we’ve been waiting, as well as the resurrection of Hole. While some of Perry’s pop influence (along with a few Billy Corgan riffs) remain on the songs being prepared for Nobody’s Daughter, Courtney seems to have found that a certain attitude and vision that could only come from herself is essential to moving forward, and has scrapped or re-worked most of what she wrote & recorded with her muse Perry.

And so let’s look at that from another angle: These characteristics that Courtney has rediscovered to get Nobody’s Daughter into the proverbial birth canal finally were defining characteristics of Hole. And so unlike Corgan, Weiland, and Rossdale, calling Nobody’s Daughter a Hole album seems much more of a simple matter of consequence than a shameless exhumation.

The only question is whether or not the girl’s still got it… The evidence so far is inconclusive.