Hole- Celebrity Skin (1998)

 

This might seem like an odd choice of Hole album to start with, as it's their last real one and in many ways a bit of an outlier, a very different style (more "mainstream" and more "mature", many say).

It's a curate's egg but, like the egg behind that phrase, parts of it are truly excellent. "Celebrity Skin" itself is a superb little rock belter, while "Reasons to Be Beautiful" and especially "Northern Star" are both achingly beautiful songs that manage to be defiant and uplifting on the one hand but ery real on the other. These are two of my favourite songs of all time, with the result that I don't really care that much of the rest of the album is filler: these two songs are worth it.

The overall sound is odd, I suppose. There's certainly little obvious sign of Billy Corgan's supposed influence. But the song structures are in many ways quite mainstream, even AOR on the surface, but there's something about the "realness" of it all that stops me from seeing this album as any kind of sellout- perhaps charitably. Those two songs really are that good.