Hole Review: Sound Academy July 10th, 2010

Courtney Love Lives Through Rehab and Rebranding

Maybe it’s because on September 1^st 1994 she dedicated a show at the Phoenix to drummer Kristen Pfaff who’d dies shortly before due to a heroin overdose, or that one time a girl died at a Hole concert in Vancouver, but Courtney Love holds a very special place in Canada’s heart.

As the most tragic woman in the history of Rock n’ Roll, Courtney showed up at the Sound Academy last night and I finally got my slice of her riot girl pie. Hole was that girl band that even the boys were into and Live Through This is that album every prissy tomboy secretly goes back to whenever they feel dead inside.

Besides the bottle of air born agua and a couple of lesbians making out to “Tangerine” in front of me, the crowd was pretty tame.  LA’s original banged beauty floated to her mic and right off the bat, she immaculately tore the rooms guts out with “Sympathy for the Devil”.  Business as usual, the vapid turned maiden coasted effortlessly through “Skinny Little Bitch” and before lighting her first cigarette, Courtney teased the hater in us all with a second cover, “Closer” – an epic 90′s track by a band she’d verbally castrated in an interview as a younger, less diplomatic icon.

Still rocking the trademark monitor pose,  and in a little black dress, Love looked half her age. As Toronto played judge, there wasn’t a bad bone to be picked. With new songs like “Honey” and one of the tightest business models in the industry; rehab proves to have done her well.  With this tour comes a stack of great new songs and the most successfully executed rebranding strategy I have ever seen.

A set balanced like my mother’s cheque book. 33.3% Live Through This, Celebrity Skin, and Nobody’s Daughter, Grunge, Pop, and Alt- Country respectively, her performance was clean, serious and fit for the tails of healthy musicianship.

As said in an interview with Spin Magazine earlier this year, “I hated waking up with fucking eggs Benedict on my face and a 1,000-page letter I didn’t remember writing”.  Clearly, Love has come a long way in what seems like a simple binge period of time.

I could go off on some tangent about Hole being a perfect metaphor to the current state of the American gouvernement, but I won’t. All I will say is that Hole is Hole. Not Pretty Hole. Not Hot Hole. Not Lovely Hole, just Hole. And at 46 years old, Nobody’s Daughter is an exponentially better reflection of Courtney Love’s artistic capacity than whoever she’d been pretending to be before.

Photo Credit: Natalie Lisa Johnson

Words Katherine Alicia Snack