Music

Reviews

By Sam Prestianni  ,  Paul Kimball ,  and  Dave Clifford

Hole
Deeper
(DGC)

Hole's long-awaited follow-up to their breakthrough 1994 album Live Through This is a triumphant return unparalleled since Elvis' historic 1968 comeback TV special. But unlike the King, Hole are not trying to prove that they still look good in leather. Instead, the band -- with Courtney Love at the helm -- wants to show how much they've grown. On Deeper Hole will undoubtedly surprise alternative-rock kiddies with their daring embrace of a presumably played-out genre, but in the able hands of Love and her band, the style sometimes referred to as British metal has never sounded so vital.

The clear influence of Diamond Head, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden is all over Deeper, most shockingly on the album's opener, a scorching paean to individual freedom called "My Prescription." The blazing guitar lead that seamlessly segues into Love's caterwauling shriek explosively broadcasts that real reinvention is at hand. (Now Hole's 1996 version of the Fleetwood Mac tune "Gold Dust Woman" can be seen as an early indication of this sonic sea change. Who can forget that Judas Priest's star rose in the States only after their pioneering cover of the Mac's "Green Manalishi"?)

True to the form, there are plenty of galloping riffs and squealing guitar solos on Deeper, but Hole's interpretation is not strictly a recitation of lessons learned from the masters. The dual guitar solo on "Queen Bee" proves that Love has had plenty of time to practice her scales in between Versace fittings, and the subtlety and inventiveness of her playing are beyond anything heard since Priest axeman K.K. Downing shredded his fretboard. Gone are her punk-inspired flailings, replaced instead with a sense of tonality and voicing that owes much more to the music of Schoenberg and Coltrane than the distorted minor chords of Kurt Cobain. Eric Erlandson also shows that he knows what to do with a 32-bar solo, filling the lead section of the demonic blues rave-up "Daddy Sleeps Alone" with what seems like an impossible number of notes.

The only misstep on this remarkable album is the somewhat sterile remake of the Motsrhead track "Love Me Like a Reptile." Elsewhere, Love and company bury their predecessors, but other than a stunning high-pitched squeal toward the song's finale, this isn't much more than a rote rendition of a classic. Neither will questions about Love's authorship of her songs be soon resolved if she insists on including tracks like "Marked" -- shockingly close to Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" -- or the album's only nod to her own roots, the raging but uncomfortably familiar album closer "Town Spirit," which bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Nirvana's most famous song. (Love sings, "How low, how low, hello.") On the other hand, the overall sound of Deeper couldn't be further from Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, or Blinker the Star, whose leaders were long rumored to be lending Love a helping hand.

Nevermind authorship, Hole have produced an album that meets and beats the seemingly insurmountable expectations that preceded it. Deeper is a triumph, not only as a record, but as a heartwarming story of perseverance over musical stagnation and bad press.

-- Paul Kimball

Various Artists
Essential Pebbles, Volume One
(AIP/Bomp)

The material remains of previous cultures explain the beliefs and creations of current generations. Or at least archaeologists like to think so. Occasionally, the astute observer unearths such a relationship between obscure, forgotten cavities of material culture and its modern-day descendants. As the archaeologist discovers, sometimes the most pertinent and interesting elements of culture are those ideas that remain buried beneath the ruins of dominant systems.

Such is the aim of the long-running, now 28-volume Pebbles compilation series. Each record is an archaeological project, a collection of extremely obscure garage punk songs long lost beneath the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, and other dominant hit-makers of the American cultural adolescence otherwise known as rock 'n' roll. As proved by the Pebbles collections, the late '60s were peppered by an unthinkable number of never-been guitar heroes and no-hit-wonder psych-rock bands whose sounds often inspired well-loved pop tunes. In the same way, there are unfathomably subterranean groups today influencing (and eking out an existence beneath) tepid alternative and mainstream rock.

Essential Pebbles, Volume One plucks the most eructatious and ass-slappin' songs from the Pebbles compilation series. Disc 1, which culls recordings from the first 10 volumes, is a foundation for the Pebbles novice. Disc 2, for the seasoned archivist, contains 26 unreleased rockers that never made it into the series until now. Each tune of this 55-song double CD set presents another dimension of rock swagger and apocalyptic brevity; in total, it's punk rock in its most energized, infectious, and primordial form. The result is a string of rock 'n' roll hits as hummable as they are inspiring to smash up the living room.

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