Live Through This (180 Gram Vinyl)

Hole: Courtney Love (vocals, guitar); Eric Erlandson (guitar); Kristen Pfaff (piano, bass, background vocals); Patty Schemel (drums). Additional personnel: Dana Kletter (vocals). Recorded at Triclops Studios, Atlanta, Georgia. LIVE THROUGH THIS would have been an important record even without the heartbreaking overtones surrounding Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain and their daughter Frances Bean. In light of those events, however, there is a poignant resonance to Hole's songs that amplifies, and in some cases transcends their original meaning. With her husky growl and simmering sing-song delivery, Courtney Love at times suggests a female Johnny Rotten. Sugar and spice and all things nice she is not, if a song like "Doll Parts" is any indication ("Someday you will ache like I ache"). She sounds like someone who was denied a real childhood, and life's experiences seemed to have curdled inside of her. The soft-hard-soft-hard program of each song reflects a conflict between her suppressed feminine yearnings and her own world-weary, tough-gal persona. Love's bitter, over-the-top emotional recollections give LIVE THROUGH THIS much of its bite, while Hole's refined, kick-ass arrangements tend to humanize, and occasionally soften Love's wellsprings of resentment. In contrast to the relentless punk rock of PRETTY ON THE INSIDE, LIVE THROUGH THIS is a more polished alternative production, although tunes like "Gutless" are pure Sex Pistols rant and raveup ("All my friends are embryonic, all my friends are dead and gone/All my friends are microscopic, all my friends wake up alone...Sleep with me wake up alive...I don't really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus"). Her sensuality and sexual ambivalence are front and center on LIVE THROUGH THIS. "You should learn how to say no," she yowls on "Violet." ("When they get what they want, they never want it again...Go on take everything, take everything, I want you to." Not exactly "The Chapel Of Love.") Every inch the failed romantic and social outcast, on songs like "Asking For It" and "Rock Star" Love compulsively peels away at her own skin until a throbbing void of bitterness is all that remains. Look away if you can't take the truth or fathom the enigmatic lyrics, but you won't be able to ignore LIVE THROUGH THIS.