Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Hole

[#] Live Through This (1994)

The most mixed of bags.

Reviewed May 11, 2021

(This is an album that was previously covered on the Rediscovering! Click the link in the table to read a wordier and possibly less accurate version of my feelings on this album.)

What a harsh name for a record. It's hard to separate Hole's entire career from the specter of Courtney Love's much better respected husband, whose body was found less than a week before Live Through This' release, and I suppose that it's your call if that's thanks to checkout line rag culture or due to the quality of Hole's music. If Live Through This is any indication, it's the latter. In brief: the backing band is unremarkable, the songs are spotty, and Courtney tosses out repetitive lyrics and absolutely embarrassing, clunky lines with impunity. It's a shame, and despite my qualms about the words, the most compelling part of this record is Courtney's presence. She can howl, she can captivate through her pain, and sometimes—just not enough to call this one a particularly great album—she's got a nice tune in tow.

Hole proves themselves audibly tight and entirely faceless on the instrumental front on Live Through This. As much as I appreciate the fact that all the basslines were from the tracking takes, Eric Erlandson's guitar work, especially on the uptempo fare like "Violet" and "She Walks Over Me", is entirely meat and potatoes punk, just with a shimmery effect on it sometimes. You would not be able to pick out a Hole instrumental even at gunpoint (uh, sorry), and I stick to that. Listening to this record instead for Courtney gives you, well, Courtney Love—someone who can just as easily hold you in the air, like on the eerie rumination on sexual concert violence "Asking For It", or entrance you with her messy, uncomfortable humanity on the achingly beautiful "Doll Parts" as she can utterly ruin "Softer, Softest" by describing herself as "pee girl". God. Fucking. Dammit.