Celebrity Skin is less about those in the spotlight than those who get lost in the shadows along the way: the sold-out sluts, self-destructive pop boys, and \u201cmight-have-been\u201ds, all the \u201cbeautiful garbage\u201d littering US 101. The dedication reads, \u201cTo all the stolen water of Los Angeles and to anyone who ever drowned,\u201d while the back cover pays homage to a doomed Ophelia. The album opens with three jet-engine chords and a wink at Love\u2019s own notoriety. \u201cOh, make me over\/I\u2019m all I wanna be,\u201d she snarls over a buzzing riff. \u201cA walking study\/In demonology.\u201d Full of \u201cyeah-ah-ahs\u201d and glittery blown-out guitars, \u201cCelebrity Skin\u201d offers a backstage tour of Hollywood. Love plays the wilted starlet whose soul was her price of entry: \u201cYou want a part of me?\/Well, I\u2019m not selling cheap.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Celebrity Skin, Hole cranked the dial on their \u201cinternal AM radio\u201d and channeled 1970s California AOR tunes. Grunge was on its way out, and besides, Hole had always been proud pop fans. Back in 1989, Erlandson responded to an ad Love placed that read, \u201cI want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac.\u201d Hole had spent two albums wiping the muck away until Celebrity Skin emerged, as polished as they would ever get.<\/p>\n
Love initially struggled to get the record off the ground and needed someone to light a creative (and competitive) spark in her, so she called up Billy Corgan. (In addition to being Love\u2019s ex-boyfriend, the Smashing Pumpkins<\/a> frontman had recommended Auf der Maur after seeing her band play in Montreal.) Corgan has co-arrangement credits on five songs, including the title track, and was initially announced as the album\u2019s executive producer. But he left the project to work on the Pumpkins\u2019 Adore<\/a>, and Hole hired Michael Beinhorn, known for his work with Soundgarden<\/a>, Red Hot Chili Peppers<\/a>, and Ozzy Osbourne<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though Hole\u2019s sound had expanded, their bite remained razor sharp. Case in point: \u201cAwful,\u201d a Trojan horse critique of the music industry. Atop a power-pop interpolation of \u201cSwing Low, Sweet Chariot,\u201d Love calls out executives eager to exploit \u201call the girls like you.\u201d Bubbly like cherry cola\u2014and are those notes of Neil Diamond<\/a> or Unrest<\/a>?\u2014the song\u2019s carbonation goes flat ahead of the final verse, as Love growls, \u201cOh, just shut up, you\u2019re only 16.\u201d But \u201cAwful\u201d ends with rousing defiance: \u201cIf the world is so wrong\/Yeah, you can break them all with one song.\u201d \u201cReasons to Be Beautiful,\u201d co-arranged with Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go\u2019s<\/a>, comments on vanity and self-loathing. \u201cMiles and miles of perfect sin\/I swear, I said, I fit right in,\u201d Love chants. \u201cI fit right in your perfect skin\/I cannot breathe.\u201d Delivered with pinkprick precision, each shifting verse seems to pirouette on the head of a needle.<\/p>\n On the title track, Love describes a woman who has obliterated everything she kissed, and indeed, desire is a corrosive force on Celebrity Skin. \u201cThe one I love, I should destroy\/My sweet tooth has burned a hole,\u201d Love croons on the dreamy \u201cHit So Hard.\u201d The conflation of violence and ecstasy echoed by the chorus\u2014\u201cHe hit so hard\/I saw stars\/He hit so hard\/I saw God\u201d\u2014evokes \u201cHe Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss),\u201d a song Hole had covered<\/a>. Sublime obliteration is a recurring theme. \u201cOur love is quicksand\/So easy to drown\u201d; \u201cI look at him and drown.\u201d \u201cWhen the water is too deep\/You can close your eyes and really sleep tonight,\u201d goes the siren song \u201cBoys on the Radio,\u201d a twinkly homage to troubled musicians Evan Dando<\/a>, Brian Wilson<\/a>, and Jeff Buckley<\/a> after the latter drowned in 1997. \u201cDown by the sea\/Is where you drown your scars,\u201d Love sings on \u201cMalibu,\u201d and she sounds radiant atop washes of golden guitars singed with melancholy. \u201cMalibu\u201d pleads with a bright burnout to find salvation, but he\u2019s already doomed. As the sun sets over an ocean of angels, Love\u2019s protagonist walks into the Pacific, the differences between self-destruction and salvation washed away by waves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Celebrity Skin is less about those in the spotlight than those who get lost in the shadows along…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703141,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88,148628],"class_list":["post-703140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-sunday-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}