Are you smelling a theme?…
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[6.43]
Alfred Soto: She’s lost neither her contempt for consonants nor her deep regard for brontosaurus riffage, and in a year when Paramore will score its biggest American hit she should — theoretically — have no trouble asserting her place. But 2004 felt like her moment too. So here’s another example of her deep but erratic talent. Buy or download — we might have to wait a while for the rest.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: This is the sort of track one might have expected from both America’s Sweetheart and the demos that ultimately became that fourth “Hole” album (but not that album itself) — angry but spare, using simple riffs to bludgeon, plenty of energy, plenty of space. It’s filled with easter eggs for Courtney stans, too, like how the third verse is lifted more or less wholesale from the whispered intro to Celebrity Skin‘s “Dying,” for starters, and I keep wanting to segue into “Mono” at times as well. It’s fair to say that she’s not as sharp lyrically here as she usually is, but what makes “Wedding Day” work is that despite its obviously quick gestation, Courtney’s ideas are still good, her personality is still powerful, her anger is still potent and, best of all, she’s resisted the urge to overthink or overproduce herself.
[8]
Megan Harrington: It sounds like Courtney Love cracked her skull open and sucked all the air out of the room. She breeds complicated allegiances and qualified endorsements and I never feel bad chucking that nuance in favor of a squall of feedback and lines like “Get out! Get out! Get out of my bed!”
[8]
Anthony Easton: This is the tenth or eleventh attempt I have tried to write this. I still can’t quite figure out how i feel. I love it for the same reasons that I think I love the new Tori or even late Dylan: it seems a return to form. But I am disappointed, because a return to form can also be read as a retreat. Sounding like it could have come from ca. 1994, it’s the most nostalgic thing that Courtney has ever done — ironic for an artist whose writing has always flirted with but never embraced full-tilt nostalgia (or, when it did, it was for a generation before — see “Malibu”). Part of this is how it rejects sex — when she growls “Daddy, Daddy don’t you fuck with me”, it might as well be “Daddy Don’t Fuck Me” — and this is from one of this generation’s prime poets of female sexual liberation (come on, listen to “But Julian, I’m A Little Bit Older Than You”). But, you know, I wonder if this female sexual liberation is a bit uncritical these days, and so the refusal of that allows for other energies to come through — and Riot Grrl feels like unfinished business, or at least business that should have ended with Amazons and heads on pikes instead of vacant Tumblr accounts and a mediocre sketch comedy show. The primal (as in before time, as in Yoko with all the baggage) scream at the end, reminds of that potential. Maybe we can work through those tasks again. But I am setting up women against each other, and this is an asshole move. I guess this just sounds wounded, and the last time Courtney released an album she had a song that said “I am the center of the universe”. She could have been our Joe Strummer or Robert Plant. I don’t even know if she knows who she is now.
[7]
Rebecca Toennessen: It’s not necessary or wise to diagnose someone else’s crippling mental health difficulties, but Courtney Love’s lyrics have screamed “BPD” at me for some time now. “Wedding Day” is no exception: the screeched NOs, the bitter “just remember that I never forget,” fit this flavour of personality disorder to a T. I wanted to either love it OR hate it more — kind of like how I feel about Courtney herself, really. It’s raw and rough and I like it for that, but it also feels tired and a bit by-the-numbers.
[6]
Ramzi Awn: Mediocrity at its best is a good look for Courtney Love, and the “Wedding Day” chorus is no exception, getting Courtney pretty riled up (on the inside). The pitch-perfect screams at the end almost make it worth it, but not quite.
[4]
Mallory O’Donnell: Love’s always had a fearsome presence as a singer, capable at her ballsiest of a staggering amount of raw power. Some questionable moves in recent years have done nothing to diminish this potential. The production here leans on a wide dynamic range, perfect for her guitar style and tailored to sound much like it will live, rather than for the radio. A smart move and one that steers this away from more mere 90s revival.
[5]