Hole - Celebrity Skin

Thu 18th Aug, 2005 in Music Reviews

There’s something about an album you loved as a 12 year old, and have listened to far too often: you’ll always love it. Celebrity Skin by Hole is the album that made me love music, so when I sit down to review it, it’s almost heartbreaking. The album which satisfied me so easily seven years ago, the album which made me look at the world differently just isn’t the spectacular, ground-breaking, literary masterpiece I thought it was. There’s one thing I do know, though, it will always be one of my favourites. No matter what.

Celebrity Skin by Hole: the final mark that one of the most promising bands in history left on the music industry. For what this album should have been, it didn’t quite hit the mark. I was satisfied with it as a 12 year old, but let’s face it; Hole wasn’t a band for kids.

Courtney Love has never had an easy time as a musician. 1994’s Live Through This introduced to a greater part of the world the monster that is Courtney Love, and it was Hole’s crowning glory. Courtney was tough, she’d just dealt with her husband committing suicide, and was a rock chick through and through. It was an album that was grungy, and it exposed raw emotion.

The problem is, far too many critics were clamouring over each other in order to take Courtney down first. Although acclaimed, the Live Through This credit was stripped from Courtney, as many declared it a piece of work produced by the late Kurt Cobain. Celebrity Skin saw the same critics call for a return to the past form of Courtney, the form they denounced just a few years earlier. And although criticisms have always been prefaced with a brief, throwaway comment about the ‘ability’ she may have, Love has largely been cast aside. The truth is, she is a genius – dud album or not, this girl’s got the goods.

It’s much of this which made me shrug off criticisms of the Celebrity Skin album as a kid. But now, listening with the intent to review, I realise that many of them were right. Instead of being served with another dose of hard edged rock, we were meekly passed something that wasn’t earth shattering for 1999, it wasn’t even original. Celebrity Skin was a safe, mainstream, commercial pop/rock release. File it between Spiderbait and Hanson. Yep, that’s right, this is girly pop. I can only imagine how the devoted fans felt when they bought it. And now it’s all too clear why the only reports I remembered about this disc were how Hole fell flat and just didn’t deliver.

But hey, let’s not be too harsh on Courtney and her gang here, there’s some absolute gold on this disc. The title track is the perfect pop/rock tune, you can tell by how many movies it’s been licensed to. The perfection doesn’t stop there though. In fact, about half of this album is actually decent.

Dying is the most poignant moment on the album, as the pace steps down, and we see Courtney actually does have some depth behind her outlandish antics. Reasons To Be Beautiful is one of the few tracks on the album where I actually think she is being honest with us. She sings about her life that is slowly falling apart. It’s a pity nobody seemed to notice until it was too late. It’s also a pity Northern Star seems to be one of the only other songs you can sense she put her heart into.

And then we have the other tracks, the ones that should have been B-sides, the tracks that are so far removed from what Hole once were, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, it’s just so ridiculous. I can’t help but think a song like Awful was meant as a joke, when Hole would sit back with their feet up, listening to fans rave about it, whilst they secretly knew it was rubbish. Or maybe they thought it was good. Just like I assume they thought second single Malibu was good, when really it was a pile of rubbish, which was then followed by a video aching for the same description. Boys On The Radio used to be the track I wish my CD would skip on, and it looks like my view hasn’t changed. Poppy and sappy, there’s nothing worse.

As illusion shattering as this album may be seven years down the road, I still think Courtney Love is my hero.