While I admire the nineties Seattle music scene (and have plenty of music from it) I never fell as hard for it as some of my peers. That’s the only excuse – a thin one at best – on why it took me so damned long to come around to Hole’s masterpiece, “Live Through This”. Glad to be catching up now.
Disc 1893 is… Live Through This
Artist: Hole
Year of Release: 1994
What’s up with the Cover? A now iconic image capturing the intersection of savagery and beauty that is a pageant.
How I Came To Know It: This album is kind of a Big Deal, so I knew about it for years, but never thought to buy it. This was foolish.
Fortunately, I belong to a club of music enthusiasts where we share our discoveries, and last year someone brought a song off of “Live Through This”. This caused me to investigate, recognize my previous oversight, and correct it on my next visit to the local record store.
How It Stacks Up: This is my only Hole album, so it doesn’t stack up.
Ratings: 5 stars
Alternating between a sultry croon and a full-throated growls, “Live Through This” is consistent in one thing: it’s visceral rage. It’s the good kind of rage; targeted and thought-provoking. The kind that makes the listener confront society and all its ills and reconcile their place in that mess.
Grounded in the Seattle grunge sound, “Live Through This” sits at the nexus of punk and rock, with an undercurrent of pop-music hooks to help the medicine (which is often bitter) go down easier.
Like the album’s cover, this is a record about beauty with its mascara messy and running. Appearance and image – and the twisted way society can weaponize it – feature heavily throughout. On “Miss World” we see the inner turmoil and trauma of a pretty girl, and on “Asking For It” we have perhaps the greatest rebuke to that tired and petty sexual assault defence ever codified in music.
Courtney Love isn’t a multi-octave crooner, but she makes no claims to be. If anything, I think history has unfairly judged her vocals. She has a slightly-flat tone that matches well with her punk-style delivery. The slight disconnect, one half step away from pop, is a big part of what puts the sharp edges on these songs. When she’s singing quiet, she makes it sound dangerous. When she opens up into full metal growl she lifts the song up into the roiling angry storm that the lyrics call for.
The rest of the players are equally exceptional, with their skillful playing providing the platform from which Love can explore the space in the song without anything ever going off the rails- or going off the rails just enough.
Guitarist (and principle co-writer) Erik Erlandson is particularly notable, delivering rock grooves and metal crunch with equal skill. His guitar has a foreboding tone that matches the themes of the record well. On “Credit in the Straight World” there is even a hint of Buddy Holly lurking in there, under all that reverb.
On a tragic note, this record was the last for bassist Kristen Pfaff who would die of a heroin overdose shortly after recording at the young age of – you guess it – 27. Damn you once again, heroin. Damn you.
An unexpected discovery for me is “Jennifer’s Body” a song that is simultaneously about the attack on a woman’s body, and also her own inner disconnect from it. Is it a song of murder and mayhem, or just crippling self-doubt? Yes. It fits well with the 2009 movie of the same name. Not the same plot, but clearly with themes that (I think) are partially inspired by the song 15 years earlier.
There aren’t many records that can be this angry but still retain focus, but this record accomplishes it. It is a record that, like its title, isn’t just for listening, it’s for living through. You’ll be confronted with the inner demons of its creators but reflected back through the harsh lens of society that is one of the reasons they were possessed by those demons in the first place.
This is a winner of a record that took a while to find a home in my collection but will be getting a lot of playing time in the years to come.
Best tracks: all tracks
No comments:
Post a Comment