Nobody's Daughter

Songwriters Linda Perry and Billy Corgan (moonlighting from the Smashing Pumpkins), producer Michael Beinhorn--sand down her rough edges and turn Nobody's Daughter into a dreary piece of middle-of-the-road product.

A dismal and insipid collection of retrogressive mid-tempo ballads and textbook alt.rock moves.

On many levels it's immediately obvious that Nobody's Daughter is neither an awful record, nor a great one.

While Love remains as ferocious as ever, the bleak, samey production here doesn't always rise to meet her.

Like most Hole albums, Nobody's Daughter has flashes of inspiration but is generally weighed down by inconsistency and too many songs that sound like they were phoned in.

If 'America's Sweetheart' was a breakdown record, 'Nobody's Daughter' is a recovery album. As that analogy would suggest, it's not always pretty to witness.

Overall, Nobody's Daughter isn't a complete backfire, but it is proof that Love should hang up the Hole moniker and stick to her own solo career instead, since this release is basically a Courtney Love solo record that just happens to have a Hole logo on the cover instead.

The main impression left by Nobody's Daughter represents no great surprise: that for all her raging intelligence, Courtney Love is only as good as her collaborators. [Jun 2010, p.121]

Nobody's Daughter isn't a true success - but it's a noble effort.

The rest of Nobody's Daughter is largely hit or miss. The album is bookended by songs composed solely by Love: The title track is lyrically amateurish, filled with the kind of macabre imagery you'd find in a high school student's poetry or a Nine Inch Nails album, while the bonus track "Never Go Hungry," on the other hand, impresses for its effortless couplets.

I would love nothing more than to tell you that Nobody's Daughter is a massive ***-you to the haters, but unfortunately, all this does is give them more ammunition, meekly soiling the legacy of a band that deserves far, far better.

Love herself, though, has barely changed: still enslaved by the need to vent every emotion as it happens, she's alternately thrilling (see the snarling, visceral Skinny Little Bitch) and tedious (quite a lot of the other tracks).