about punk-rock brats living on major-label largesse or believe profanity is the last refuge of the inarticulate, the sheer force of Love's corrosive, lunatic wail not to mention the guitar-drum wrath unleashed in its wake is impressive stuff, a scorched-earth blast of righteous indignation as feral and convincing as anything in Johnny Rotten's bark-and-spittle repertoire.
It is also the very thing that made Courtney Love, Hole's founding singer and guitarist, such a wonder grrrl in the first place. Even before she ascended to celebrity spousehood, Love was the scarred beauty queen of underground-rock society, a fearless confessor and feedback addict whose sinister charisma part ravaged baby doll, part avenging kamikaze angel suggested the dazed, enraged, illegitimate daughter of Patti Smith. Hole's 1991 debut album, the gloriously assaultive Pretty on the Inside, remains a classic of sex-mad self-laceration, hypershred guitars and full-moon bawling, in particular the spectacular goring of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" (a k a "Clouds") at the end of the record. You don't really know the solitary despair at the core of that song until you've heard Love's embittered delivery of the last two lines "It's life's illusions I recall/I really don't know life at all" over guitarist Eric Erlandson's fading squall.
Live Through This is, in comparison, prettier on the outside, with a greater emphasis on crushed-velvet guitar distortion and liquid poppish strumming. There are tart, hooky guitar maneuvers (the sing-along clatter of "Miss World") and vocal airs and graces (the faux-Gregorian drone prefacing the hepped-up cover of Young Marble Giants' "Credit in the Straight World") that invoke the divine hammering of the Breeders. Even when Love picks at her open wound in "Doll Parts," a song written from the losing end of naked ambition and vicious manipulation, she doesn't overplay the hurt.
When I saw Hole perform the song live in Los Angeles back in the spring of '92, Love flayed the melody with suicidal anguish in front of Erlandson's industrial-strength guitar snort. Here, to the tense whisper of more muted picking, Love simply lets the scar tissue speak for itself: "He only loves those things because he loves to see them break/I fake it so real, I am beyond fake/And someday, you will ache like I ache."
Unlike Love's husband