I totally disagree!!

Spin has always kissed and always will kiss Courtney Love's ass way more than it needs to be, so don't worry, Aja.*

And no, I'm not an obsessive Courtney hater, I'm rather indifferent towards her, no matter how crazy or not crazy, talented or untalented she is.

They gave her a Goddamned A-.

That is just!!

They gave Probot a B+

Is it because they think Dave hates Courtney?

No, it's because a. Spin never has really liked metal and only pretends to when its semi-fashionable as it is now, and b. they love Courtney. One of their main writers, Marc Spitz, is apparently good friends with her.

that new courtney love song couldn't get any worst.
i would much rather listen to the distillers and i really don't like the distillers.
i haven't heard probot yet but dave is a great drummer so the drumming on it has to be better than anything on the courtney love album.

Man.

There is also this person who likes Courtney at this resturant/bar. The resturant/bar has magazines in it's windows. Every time I go by I see that issue of Rolling Stone (I think that's what it is) with Hole on the cover.

They used to also have another magazine with Courtney when she died her hair black (or was it brown?). For some reason it's not there anymore.

i still can't believe she killed kurt

I think Courtney Love represents to Spin all of the things One Should Wish To Idealize: unstudied womens'-studies-cred, antiquarian punkishness, a rudimentary disrespect for the status quo, etc., etc.,

So it's difficult for them to discount any offering from her, even if it's crappy and minor. And the cultural significance of PROBOT is something SPIN needs to capitalize upon: GNARLY, COUNTER-CULTURAL, and black-background w/ white text and red visited links. So, Aja, don't blame Spin. It's just their necessity upon ad-revenue that makes them dependent upon the CL trashing.

They have this long artical on Probot but they don't even mention it on the cover!

They also have one on Courtney, but they put that on the cover. Well in the corner. But still!

Oh wait. They mention Courtney on the side. Thinking of wrong magazine.

Would it be out of line to predict the album to show in their "Best albums of 2004?" They've never failed to include a Hole record.

Oh no!!!

Say it ain't so.

Probably will happen though

Courtney is extremely underrated. She has a good voice for the type of music she's aiming for-- she does the punk voice way better than the Distillers girl, I think. She also has a pretty impressive knowledge of her history -- with punk especially (I saw her on TV talking about Gang of Four and some other bands Avril Lavigne would have trouble pronouncing), and most of the criticism brought against her doesn't really have much to do with her music in the first place/have any basis in reality at all.

Well that is true.

But in this particular review, she's overrated.

I think Kerrang gave her the review she deserved. They also gave a rightfully earned review to Probot.

I don't mind Courtney one way or the other, really. Even when she's at her flakiest, she's at least entertaining. I just think Spin always kisses her ass too much.

Exactly!

I like her a lot.. will have to check the Spin review. I haven't got the album yet..

http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/clove.jpg

Aja, how can you continue to say this review is overrated when you haven't actually heard the album?

I said in my question that my opinion wasn't valid. But if supposedly, "Mono" is one of the best songs, there rest can't be so so great to blow me away and like it more than Probot.

Although I'm curious to hear what song they describe to sound like classic Hole. I think I might by that album and at least one Hole album in a few years.

Maybe the Courtney-album reviewer gave the album a good review because they really liked it!!!!11111111111

i totally admire Aja's "i don't even need to hear it to know it sucks" attitude. fuckin rock n roll, innit.

I hate Courtney. Can't someone run her over?

Now I think about it... s n d is completely OTM! I think there might need to be a whole new thread about this.

Courtney Love
America's Sweetheart
Virgin

Courtney Love is no healer--of herself or anyone else. And that's why, despite the nose job, boob lift, designer gowns, and kissy-poo swanning down red carpets, she's no pop star. She's incapable of telling us that everything's gonna be all right. But when it comes to testitying to how everything's totally, unbearably, exhilaratingly fucked-up beyond despair, she has few peers. And that's why she's a rock star.

But Love hasn't shown much intrest in her best role during the past several years. She has pursued celebrity via supporting gigs in tepid films (Man on the Moon, 200 Cigarettes, Trapped) and by cavorting like a Banger sister with Winona Ryder, et al. There's the tawdry legal battle over her late husband's legacy. The public spitting match with producer/ex-boyfriend Jim Barber. And the continuing drug problems--daughter Frances Bean was taken into custody after Mom overdosed in front of her.

So by all rights, America's Sweetheart (her first relese since Hole's 2002 dissolution) should be a pathetic mess, and at times, it is. But it's also a jaw-dropping act of artistic will and fiery, proper follow-up to 1994's Live Through This. While that record chronicled Love's travails in the '80s and '90s underground alt-punk, tragic-flannel subculture that made her rich and famous, this album assails the '90s and '00s Hollywood shit pile that's been burying the singe alive. It's a subject she tried to finesse on Hole's 1998 farwell album, Celebrity Skin, which wanted to take you on a sunny, hopeful cruise down the Malibu coast, with Love pretending to be Stevie Nicks in a tube top, while Billy Corgan did the modern-rock soft shoe.

But with America's Sweetheart, there's no pussyfooting around. Love meets you at LAX, tosses you into the back of a limo, blacks out the lights, and before you hit La Cienega and Fairfax, it's on. The squalling, grind-house single "Mono" is essentially an update of Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life": the sound of a done-it-all rocker suckering you into coveting her unspeakable existence. Like Iggy, Love's had it in the ear before and as the guitars crank, she gives you an earful: "Rock is dead"; you can't make a hooker come"; and God owes her a great song so she can show all these "brillian boys" who's boss. She sneers rhetorically, "Did you miss me?!" The bitch is back.

And she's just getting revved up. "But Julian, I'm a Little Bit Older Than You" is a hilariously horny rant about the fashion-concious garage-rock scene (that should be subtitled "Stalking the Strokes").Love vows to outrock the cooler-than-thou swish kids-- and succeeds--chanting "Gabba-gabba baby" and "Shut up!" until there's a puddle of sweat on the floorboards. The musicians and producers who drive her here and elsewhere are a random crew: Barber, Pink- and Christina Aguileria-enableing Linda Perry, former Hole drummers Patty Schemel and Samantha Maloney. Tom Waits and PJ Harvey sideman Joe Gore, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, and Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin, among others. But they do a specific job--giving Love a rugged, stable platform.

Gradually, the Day of the Locust hell ride shows. And on a pair of brutally earnest mid-tempo anthems--"Hold On to Me" and "Sunset Strip" (cowritten by Perry)-- the album goes after your heart for real. On the former, Love offers herself up as shelter ("I am the center of the universe!"), but ends up shivering alone. The latter jangles, builds, and roars, cresting at the four-minute mark, when she finally unveils the million dollar-question: "Were you jerking off to her / Or were you jerking off to me?" Like all pop culture, Love always turns on you, and before long, the devil's driving the car, he's drunk and she "don't care which of you he fucks up." Crying over Kurt, she air-guitars to "Smelles Like Teen Spirit," then solicits some wastoid in a Led Zepplin T-shirt.

At daybreak, there's a power ballad as a reward for those who survive, but it's really an ultimatum. This rock star takes her cut upfront. She'll make you a punch line, then beg for your faith. She'll bleed for your sins, but only when it suits her. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the Dorothy Parker of the Celebrities Uncensored era.
Grade A-

______________________________________________________________________

Probot
Probot
Sothern Lord

Why Probot? Well. perhaps Dave Grohl thinks he hasn't been featured on the Metal Sludge website quite enough. And you can certainly look at his self-described "metal fantasy camp" as a logical extension of his stints as hired-gun drummer for Queens of the Stone Age (where he wasn't mixed high enough) and Killing Joke (where he sounded like a weapon of mass destruction). But even Karl Marx, who wouldn't know doom metal from Wagner, might notice that Probot was as much a class-based inevitability as it is a vanity project.

Reading Mark Jenkins and Mark Andersen's useful, if highly subjective, D.C. hardcore history, Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital, it's hard not to notice that harDCore's most important bands (Minor Threat, the Faith, Rites of Spring, ect.) were largely made up of upper-middle-class kids from Washington, D.C., or nearby suburbs such as Arlington. The bands formed by lower-middle-class punks from the more distant Virginia and Maryland suburbs were outsiders by comparison: a little less orthodox in their thrash, a little more inclined to the occasional cover, and a little more metal than your average cue-ball heads. Scream was one of these bands, and before achieving Nirvana, Grohl--a longhair from distant Sprinfield, Virginia--was their last drummer.

And after all, Nevermind resonated with metal dudes as much as it did with punks, with kids who may have been fans of Venom, Celtic Frost, and Sepultura--whose lead singers all make appearances on this monster of rock. Grohl wrote the riffs, and he hammers like a god, letting his hero singers ('scuse me, vokillists") write the lyrics and man bellows. Lemmy's "Shake Your Blood" is the same song the Motorhead frontman has been howling since Earth cooled, but since that howl is the sound of punk and metal copulating like beasts, he can do what he wants.

But Grohl squeezes more brilliant moments out of his geographic brethren. D.C. refugee and stoner-rock guitar deity Scott "Wino" Weinrich (Saint Vitus, the Obsessed) busts out a truly whacked solo on the mountain-size "The Emerald Law," while former Void guitarist Bubba Dupree's skate-punk shredding and Corrosion of Conformity bassist Mike Dean's everyguy yell turn "Access Babylon" into killer cossover thrash. Guys in C.O.C and Nampalm Death T-shirts scared the hell out of me in middle school, and I just cowered with my Rites of Spring tape. But for Grohl, punk and metal pissed off teachers equally.
Grade B+

America's Sweetheart by Charles Aaron

Probot by Joe Gross

Stylus gave Probot a better review than AS, but Stylus is staffed entirely by fucking fags.

Kerrang gave Probot Great and America's Sweetheart Fair.

I think that's more accurate.

"Maybe the Courtney-album reviewer gave the album a good review because they really liked it!!!!"

I'm sure they did like it. I'm just saying that there's almost zero possibility of Spin ever publishing a negative review of an album by Courtney Love. I'm not crying conspiracy or anything.