Hole - Celebrity Skin - Review

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Hole have sounded angrier, rawer and more vital than they do on 1998’s Celebrity Skin, and they’ve made albums both more incendiary and more important. But there’s something about its sleek shininess that feels magnificently defiant, like someone raising a middle finger clad in swanky velvet gloves. For years, dullards had insisted Love was a fame-chasing phoney. Why bother proving them wrong when you could have so much more fun seemingly proving them right? Celebrity Skin is so unashamedly populist it feels like an act of gleeful provocation. It’s selling out and sacrilege as insurrection. It’s the band who released ‘Retard Girl’ and ‘Teenage Whore’ making an album dominated by what Love called the “internal AM pop radio in my heart”. It’s mainstream gloss weaponised into one glorious fuck-you. When Melody Maker’s Everett True told Love of his dislike for the album’s smooth AOR influences, Love was unrepentant. “I’m not going to be held back by bad punk training,” she insisted.

read Ben Hewitt's full review at The Quietus

The Quietus is a British online music and pop culture magazine founded by John Doran and Luke Turner. The site is an editorially independent publication led by Doran with a group of freelance journalists and critics. The Quietus primarily features writings on music and film, as well as interviews with a wide range of notable artists and musicians. The magazine also occasionally includes pieces on literature, graphic novels, architecture, and TV series. The website is edited by John Doran, who claims that it caters for "the intelligent music fan between the age of 21 and, well, 73". Its staff list includes former writers for publications such as Melody Maker, Select, NME and Q, including journalist David Stubbs, BBC Radio 1 DJ Steve Lamacq, Professor Simon Frith and Simon Price among others.

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