Nobody's Daughter: For the Love of fiery rock’n’roll

Album Of The Week: Nobody’s Daughter by Hole, Mercury. 

Courtney Love: Will never drop her status as Kurt Cobain’s widow.

 

Earlier this year, the beaming, blowsy spectacle of Courtney Love at the Brit Awards, poking fun at baffled Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, felt like the overture to an overdue comeback. It was followed by a triumphant live London date by Love’s reformed rock’n’rollers Hole – and now Nobody’s Daughter, her first album since 1998’s exciting (yet ultimately destructive) Celebrity Skin.
Nobody’s Daughter could either be regarded as Hole’s fourth album, or a solo post-rehab labour of Love. The formative Hole line-up that broke through in the grungey early-1990s has messily fragmented; Love remains estranged from co-founder Eric Erlandson and has recruited Micko Larkin (Larrikin Love) on guitar, while the writing/production credits reflect her dalliances with Billy Corgan and pop powerhouse Linda Perry.
It’s easy to have reservations about Love’s public persona but there’s no denying that she’s a savagely brilliant rock’*’roll star – and she holds her own here.
This album actually starts with a resolution in the sombre, lengthy title track – yet Love regularly tears off again, with the seductive, sleazy slap in the chops that is Skinny Little Bitch or How Dirty Girls Get Clean.

Inevitably, there’s a confessional vein running throughout the themes of breakdowns and fatal romance; Love will never drop her status as Kurt Cobain’s widow.
It’s a bleak album but it’s also fiery and dogged, through to the ‘phoenix rising’ country thrum of Never Go Hungry; for proof that Love always had it in her, dig out Hole’s 1997 collection, My Body, The Hand Grenade. Love crashes and burns, then she soars.