My Body the Hand Grenade [Import]

The opener Turpentine is a greart place to land if you've adapted to their Live Through This album, instead of their glossier, Celebrity Skin. You won't find any of the same sunshine-y pop/rock on this album. The closest you'll get to commercial infidelity on My Body is Season of the Witch -- still the best alt-country song Hole never released. Courtney Love sounds amazingly lucid side-by-side with the rest of the album, but drops the books when it comes down to grain-groaning the title along the chorus, accompanied by the same bittersweet voices found on LTT. But it's her verses that stick out of the sespool of other chorus-iinclined bands of the same genre. "When I look out my window/What do you think I see/Thousands of people/Staring back at me/It's strange," but then she captures some of the only social self-consciousness obvious in her entire career: song, interview, or otherwise. I don't have to interpret every song (ahem, the tile, ahem,) especially if you know Courtney Love's rampant self-victimizing song-styles.

Love moans and scrapes across her Tank Girl featurette, Drown Soda [Live Version], much like every live track on the album. The live electricity of Eric Erlandson's intense, swamp creature guitar and Patty Schemel's undead Greecian army poundings. They sound like entities from the beyond: ravaging every song and raping it for all it's worth, meanwhile exhibiting these leud acts for everyone to see. On the other hand, an overwhemling half of this album is brooding, quiet, and timelessly introspective, but they don't leave a sour enough aftertaste to prevent the next hard track from getting you to bop your head again. Chances are, if you're looking for an album to gift-wrap for a special someone, they haven't told you about My Body, The Hand Grenade.

It's almost embarrassing that they never properly (and, by that, I mean, widely) released these songs, especially after their harsh criticism for plagarising unrecorded Kurt Cobain songs. It could've. If it truly was all about the record labels, they' could've left, if it was all about the moolah capable of releasing this album to more than just the legions of fans entering independent labels stores in cities just to get their hands on this, if it was just the fact that Courtney Love was acting out against Hole's best wishes, it all could've been resolved. But we'll never fully know why what happened in the nineties hapenned. Just plug the stereo-speakers in at your next friendly get-together of your friends and not-so-friends and blast this miracle down the street. This is not an angst-ridden, nu-metal, thrashy album -- it's a full-on attack. An angry, trashy album capable of helping induce falling-over-drunk status on party-going teenagers and adults alike, everywhere at anytime during any day of any year. Are you, you know, ready enough to embrace their scene yet, or what!? It may be lovely because it's not the complete cliché-mania people think it is, but it's accessible to any mainstream rock fans as well. A highly recommended album. One of the only albums of the nineties not rife with horrifying hind-sight for fans or "of it's time" limits.

We fans all see something different in Courtney Love and this record only does more to prove us all right.