Live Through This (1994)

All these years later and I'm still not exactly sure what to think of this, the only album by Hole that matters. At one time I took the side of Courtney Love – call it the sympathy vote – but in light of the band's skimpy follow-ons I have since, grudgingly, come to believe the insinuations about Kurt Cobain having a much, much bigger hand here than he is officially credited for. Not that this is a bunch of Nirvana songs he wrote and threw to the object of his love and hatred, only that he was heavily involved, with an enmeshment that has the density of a Lennon/McCartney collaboration, one of those where it's hard to know where one author ends and the other begins. That's one of the bitches of a primary relationship. One of many. I'm happy to give the nod to Love for the calibrated choice of Young Marble Giants cover, "Credit in the Straight World," the gratuitously bizarre denigration of all things Olympia, Washington, the various passages of shrieking and throaty caterwauling, along with putting the band together in the first place and supplying all the drive and ambition, that being hardly the least significant piece of the proceedings here. The imagery of milk and other bodily functions related to baby-having came from them both – a fascination for which being one of those things they shared. Everything else has something (or everything) of Cobain to it – all the riffs, licks, hooks, and sundry dynamics of sound. Hate Courtney Love as you will. I can't say I think much of her myself. But this album is as much testimony to Cobain's love for her as the timing of his suicide was testimony to his hate. You just can't pick it apart. There's the rub. It's frozen in time that way.