Music Box: Hole 2.0

I'm not exactly sure what to make of the new Hole album -- "Hole," of course, being shorthand for Courtney Love just as "Pretenders" is for Chrissie Hynde -- but if the first official song from it is any indication (a charming little number called "Skinny Little Bitch"), Courtney's ready to pick up where she left off in the '90s. While I wouldn't argue with anyone who said Courtney had (amazingly) outlived her usefulness -- musical or otherwise -- in my mind "Pretty on the Inside," "Live Through This" and "Celebrity Skin" were three of the best albums of that pretty useless decade of music. From the brutal "Teenage Whore" and haunting "Ask for It" to the carefree '60s girl group sound of "Awful" and "Boys on the Radio" (I'll admit it, the poppy "Celebrity Skin" is my favorite) the sparse musical legacy of the messy Ms. Love has earned my full attention on the rare occasion that she releases anything again.

What is actually on "Nobody's Daughter" is anybody's guess. (Rumored tracklisting is HERE.) Love is said to have begun writing the album back in 2005 when producer Linda Perry brought her an acoustic guitar in rehab. Michael Beinhorn and Billy Corgan then joined in, and about a dozen great songs from that era have been available on the Internet for years ("Never Go Hungry Again," "Sunset Marquis," "Letter to God"). But with Corgan recently telling Rolling Stone that if Love releases anything he worked on "it would be a real big problem, because I haven't given my permission," adding: "I have no interest in supporting her in any way, shape or form. You can't throw enough things down the abuss with a person like that," it's hard to know if she started from scratch or not (every indication is that she has not)

"This record is about greed, vengeance and feminism," says Courtney Love of her first album in six years and the first with her newest incarnation of Hole. She says that as work on the album progressed, "shit got darker, I got meaner, and the tracks got hard and big." The album comes out April 27 and I'll be ready to rock out, with new batteries in my Discman ...

Check out an intriguing set list from a recent show in London plus watch a remarkably sane Love address a group of 300 students at Oxford University HERE.