Guys, I have some really, really surprising, and upsetting, news to share. Maybe you should sit down for this one, ’cause it might be kinda hard to hear. But it’s gonna be okay. We’ll get through this together. I promise. Alright?

Are you sitting down? Okay. Good. Here we go.

Courtney Love has not been a very good mother to her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

Okay. It’s okay. I know it’s a shock. You can go ahead and cry if you need to.

See, in 2009, Frances Bean filed a restraining order against Courtney — yes, a a restraining order against her own mother. And, what’s worse, that restraining order not only restricted Love from coming near Frances Bean, but also from coming near Frances Bean’s grandmother or aunt (and for those of you playing along at home, yes, those are the same women whose finances Courtney was oh-so-concerned about back in November, when she accused Dave Grohl of being a greedy asshole who was taking money away from Kurt Cobain’s family), and, oh yeah, also from coming near the family dog. And why did the dog need protection? Well, according to newly released court documents:

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via Badass Digest

Dj Slashba — noun – 1. A temp. 2.  A fill-in, placeholder. 3. A pretender to the throne. 4. Someone who keeps an unlit cigarette dangling from lips. 5. A retard.

Props to our friend Nick for teaching us a new term.

Here’s some shit we did this week:

• We got a tour of the live rig used by Obscura’s Christian Muenzner.
• We debuted new music by Czar, and, thanks to our pals at Decibel, Agoraphobic Nosebleed.
• We spoke to Nader Sadek.
• We checked out the latest releases from Locrian, The Wounded Kings, and Astomatous.
• We examined Slayer’s tour rider.
• We wondered if this commercial will really help sell lingerie or not.
• We over-thought the latest ramblings of Courtney Love.
• We contemplated the most over-used words in extreme metal writing.
• We considered the music of Fallujah.
• By special request, Sergeant D. reviewed Carnifex’s Until I Feel Nothing.

Next week we have some very cool interviews, some very cool music premieres, and, oh yeah, we gorge ourselves on Turkey and celebrate ridding ourselves of that pesky little Native American nuisance. See ya then.

-AR

Yesterday, we saw video of Courtney Love flying off the handle when a fan held up a Kurt Cobain t-shirt during a recent performance; amongst other topics, her subsequent rant honed in on Dave Grohl, who, she seemed to claim, had been fired from Nirvana by Cobain. Later, as part of a kind-of-new-but-really-the-same rant, she said that “I don’t care what you listen to at home. But a guy takes money off my kid’s table… fuck him!” I wasn’t really clear what the hell she meant at the time, but a MetalSucks commenter named Chris asserted that “she was claiming Grohl is the one taking money off her kid’s table, which makes sense given the history of those two arguing over royalties and rights and whatnot.”

And bravo to Chris for apparently being fluent in Courtney, ’cause his assessment of the situation was absolutely correct. The PRP posted the below post-show interview with Love, in which she clarifies why she’s so pissed at Grohl. To hear her tell it, Grohl didn’t write any of Nirvana’s music (including the “drum riff” from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), makes a shit ton of money from the Foo Fighters (which is not hard to believe) and is consequently not hurting for money (which is also not hard to believe) — and yet he continues to own a piece of Nirvana, and recently purchased an Aston Martin with his Nirvana, Inc. credit card (thus he is “taking money off my kid’s table”) while Cobain’s mother and sister suffer from poverty. Check it out below, and get my thoughts after the jump:

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Wowee wow wow wow. A reader calling himself Geddy Lee — whom I’m reasonably certain is not the dude from Rush — just e-mailed us the above clip of Courtney Love going apeshit at this past weekend’s SWU festival in Brazil. The cause of her outbreak is that someone in the crowd was holding up a photo of Kurt Cobain, at which point Courtney pretty much loses it and says:

“I don’t need to see a picture of Kurt, asshole, and I’m gonna have you fucking removed if you keep throwing that up. I’m not Kurt. I have to live with his fucking shit and his ghost and his kid every day. Throwing that up is stupid and rude, and I’m gonna beat the fuck out of you if you do it again. Y’know what? You weren’t fucking married to him, I fucking was. You didn’t fucking get kicked out of a band by him like Dave, he did. Go see the fucking Foo Fighters and do that shit.”

Then she storms off the stage with a final flip of the bird, and then eventually she comes back and adds, “I don’t care what you listen to at home. But a guy takes money off my kid’s table… fuck him!”

Now, I have a lot of thoughts on this matter, so I’m kinda just gonna ramble here. Please accept my most humble apologies.

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IF SOMEONE CAN MAKE THIS HAPPEN I WILL HAVE A UTERUS SURGICALLY INSTALLED IN MY OWN BODY AND HAVE YOUR BABY.

-AR

If you are heading down to Austin for SXSW, be sure to head out to some of the metal-leaning movies on tap as part of the SXSW Film Festival. In addition to the first round of films I recently spotlighted here, even more titles have been unleashed on the unsuspecting public.

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Shortly after 8 p.m., Ms. Love burst into the room with the Marchesa dress slung on one arm and the noted German Neo-Expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer on the other. She was entirely naked and leaning on Mr. Kiefer for support. She made one lap around the room, walking in front of a photographer, an assistant, a hairstylist and me. She pulled over her head a transparent lace dress that covered up nothing, and demanded my assistance — “Not you,” she said to Mr. Kiefer, who was bent over trying to help her — to stuff her feet into a pair of black Givenchy heels that were zipped up the back and tied with delicate laces in the front. Then she applied a slash of red lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth.

“I really must get out of here,” Mr. Kiefer said.

This excerpt comes from the New York Times‘ second profile of Courtney Love this year, the first of which was done by Anthony Bozza, co-author of autobiographies from Slash and Tommy Lee, in the lead-up to Nobody’s Daughter, the album Love released under the Hole moniker without any former members. The latest piece comes from Eric Wilson in the Fashion pages, as she has become a fixture of the scene in New York as well as worldwide. While much of what he writes about is her stunning acceptance into that community, Wilson was obviously unable to resist describing how Love sabotaged her own puff piece with what have become anticipated antics.

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I’ve written before about my affinity for the music of Melissa Auf der Maur, and I know that some people were all,”Hey, this chick ain’t metal.” To which I say: au contraire. Even if her music isn’t always as heavy as a really heavy thing, she’s certainly got the metal in her blood n’ spirit. She fronted Hand of Doom, a (totally killer) Black Sabbath tribute band, and her latest solo album, Out of Our Minds, has a duet with Glenn Danzig, fer Chrissakes!

But in case you’re somehow still too metalier than thou to show Ms. Auf der Maur some love, maybe this will change your mind: She recently hit up the Heavy MTL festival in her hometown of Montreal, and filed a four-part video report from said festival. I’m skipping right to part three below, not because the first two parts aren’t great (Cute Canadian girls with funny accents! WHOO-HOO!), but because I find this interview with Mastodon’s Troy Sanders and Brann Dailor to be really, really entertaining.

Check out the other three video reports here. Melissa Auf der Maur’s latest, Out of our Minds, is out now. And after the jump, in an effort to get you all on board with the program, I’ve posted some more Auf der Maurian goodness…

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I didn’t watch VH1′s recent Behind the Music on Courtney Love, because I didn’t know that it had been made, because who the fuck knows what’s on VH1 these days? I don’t even know what channel VH1 is on my cable system. Fuck.

ANYWAY, Elise at Reign in Blonde posted the below clip from the show, in which Roddy Bottum and a woman who claims to be Courtney Love even though she looks almost nothing like the Courtney Love I remember discuss her days as the vocalist for Faith No More. And, oh yeah, the fact that they slept together. Elise put it best: “If I’m to believe that those two banged uglies, then him being gay now makes perfect sense.” It also makes sense that he doesn’t find this annoying — he’s clearly some kind of Zen master, with infinite patience for stupidity and lack of an indoor voice.

Jump to 3:10 to see the bit about Faith No More. If you told me that the blonde lady isn’t really Courtney but the real Courtney has now had enough plastic surgery that she can successfully pull an Andrew W.K., well, I wouldn’t be surprised.

-AR

Here we had this entire week devoted to hair metal, and I feel like we only scratched the surface. Let’s do this again real soon, okay?

Here’s some of the fun we had this week, be it hair-metal related or not:

• Cynic’s Paul Masvidal taught us to be mind-less, Antagonist’s Carlos Garcia taught us about the song “Sasha Grey,” and Trap Them’s Ryan McKenney taught us more about corporate-sponsored live shows.
• Anso and Allyson from Bring Back Glam! counted down the Ten Best Must-Have Glam Metal Albums.
• We counted down the Top Ten Bands Most Often Miscategorized as Hair Metal.
• Vince spoke with Serj Tankian, Gary spoke with Frankie from Emmure, and Sergeant D. spoke with Samantha Maloney from Brother Clyde/Shift/Hole/Motley Crue/every band ever.
• We debuted a new track by The Binary Code!
• Leyla Ford counted down the ten worst and best hair metal band names.
• Sammy checked out the new release by Eibon.
• Dave Mustein checked out The Cool Tour.
• Someday, this little girl is going to make Sergeant D. very, very unhappy.
• I can’t tell the difference between all the members of Mushroomhead, can you?

I wanna especially thank Allyson from Bring Back Glam! for all her help this week — we love you, Allyson! Come back anytime.

Monday we return, but we’ll have a little less Aqua Net in our hair, a little less eyeliner on our lids, and a lot less skip in our step. See ya then.

-AR

Samantha Maloney is one of the unsung veterans of the music industry, having drummed for bands including Shift, Hole, Motley Crue, and now Billy Ray Cyrus’ rock band, Brother Clyde. I’ve been a big fan of hers since she was in Shift back in the 90s, so I am sincerely stoked to finally get the chance to interview her after all these years. Thanks to Carlos Ramirez of power violence legends the Black Army Jackets for hooking it up, and please check out the Brother Clyde record, it’s actually a really good rock n’ roll album and Billy Ray will cry if his daughter outsells him.

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I wasn’t gonna say anything about this because it seemed like there really wasn’t that much to say, but fuck it – the whole situation is starting to get out of control, which is to say, it amuses me.

So Hole released a new album this week, entitled Nobody’s Daughter - which is either a hilarious reference to the fact that Courtney Love (who apparently now wants to be known as “Courtney Michelle,” because changing monikers after twenty years worked out so well for Prince) lost custody of her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, last year, or is supposed to be profound in some way I don’t give a shit about. I haven’t heard the album and really don’t care to; if Gary Suarez had never written about it, I don’t think I’d even be aware of its existence.

ANYWAY, Billy Corgan, who was once friends with Love/Michelle and may or may not have helped her write some songs which may or may not actually be on Nobody’s Daughter, responded to the record release with a Twitter tirade telling us a lot of shit we already knew – namely, that Love can’t write music on her own, that nobody would ever have given a shit about her if she hadn’t somehow tricked Kurt Cobain into squirting his baby-making juice into her, and that she’s a terrible mother. From Classic Rock:

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In February I expressed cautious excitement for Out of Our Minds, the second solo album from former Hole/Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur. Now the album is actually out and I have it… and I haven’t had time to listen to it yet. Bummer.

But AOL is now streaming the record, so even if you don’t have an unopened copy resting within arm’s reach of where you’re sitting right now, you can check it out. In fact, check it out and let me know if I need to move it further up on my list of priorities. I did check out “Father’s Grave,” the duet with one Mr. Glenn Danzig, and it’s pretty cool…

Like I said before, Out of Our Minds is out now.

-AR

We’ve been rough on Courtney Love here, perhaps more than is really fair. I attribute that to the perverse temptation to comment on her continuing tabloid antics. Love’s decision last year to reboot Hole without co-founder Eric Erlandson — or any other prior collaborator — really stuck in my craw, and my initial reaction to the first single “Skinny Little Bitch” was pretty unfavorable. But now that I’ve had some more time with that track and a brand new one premiered this week, I’m questioning my prior stance on the forthcoming Nobody’s Daughter LP.

Yes, I know that many of you are so completely close-minded (shocker!) about Courtney Love and Hole that the very suggestion that she might pull this one off will send you directly to the comments box in apoplectic frothing fits. But, like it or not, Hole had — and has – its fair share of fans, from the early noise rock days of Pretty On The Inside to the riot grrl grunge of Live Through This to the polished alt-rock of Celebrity Skin — and like it or not, I’m one of those fans.

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You can download “Skinny Little Bitch” by visiting the Hole website and giving Courtney Love your email address and birthdate. The song isn’t very good, but it’s on par with most of the lackluster material on Love’s 2004 solo album, America’s Sweetheart. That this tiresome, insincere rehash of polished riot-grrl rock was chosen as the first official single from the upcoming album confirms my suspicions that this will be a total disappointment.

On that same page you’ll also find listings for two U.S. concerts from the reconstituted band – April 22 in LA, April 27 in NYC. Nobody’s Daughter, the first Hole album in twelve years, will be available for purchase on April 26th.

-GS

I’d kill myself, too, if I woke up one day and realized I’d been giving this thing my seed:

-AR

I don’t really know what the critical consensus was on the self-titled debut solo album from ex-Hole/ex-Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, but I thought it was catchy as hell. It came out just a few months after Courtney Love’s America’s Sweetheart and certainly blew that album right the fuck out of the water, that’s for sure. If you’ve never heard it, all you really need to know to understand what kind of record it is is that Josh Homme co-wrote and appears on the album alongside James Iha, Jeorde White (a.k.a. “Twiggy Ramirez”), and some other nifty guest musicians. Either those names appeal to you, or they don’t.

ANYWAY, that was almost six years ago already, and I kinda thought maybe Ms. Auf der Maur was done with music or something. But not so! She’s just released a video for “Out of Our Minds,” the title track from her new solo album, which a press release tells me “extends into a 28-minute, HD film starring and conceived by MAdM, as well as a limited edition comic book and matching Picture Disc Vinyl illustrated by Jack Forbes from Brooklyn, NY.” Personally I’m not sure that I care about anything other than the music, but, hey, good for her for being ambitious.

So this isn’t really metal and I’m not as wild about it as I was, say, “Followed the Waves” or “Taste You”* from her last album, but it’s not bad at all:

Out of Our Minds comes out March 30. And it features a duet with Glenn Danzig!

-AR

*If you can find the French language version of “Taste You,” check it out instead of the English version. The song sounds a million times sexier en Francais.

While I love New York City 364 days out of the year, it is the last place I want to be on New Years Eve. Restaurants jack up their already steep prices, clubs overcharge for the privilege of waiting interminably for a drink at their open bars, and the streets are full of intolerable amateurs, bewildered tourists, and lapsed teetotalers. Typically, I stay at home and watch the ball drop in the comfort of my Park Avenue penthouse. Yet this time I was almost tempted to break with tradition when I read that Courtney Love would be playing a black tie event at The Standard Hotel’s Boom Boom Room. The exorbitant ticket prices, which started in the high hundreds and went well into the thousands, were prohibitive enough to keep me away, but fortunately Love has graced the IntarWebs with some candid footage of her rehearsing for the show (in what appears to be a hotel room) with Micko Larkin, a member of the reconstituted Hole. The track is a difficult-to-recognize cover of The Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” and, speaking as a longtime fan of the group, it is extremely, well, unsatisfactory.

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When I first heard that Courtney Love was going to release her long-delayed solo record under the Hole name, I considered it “a huge fuck you to co-founder Eric Erlandson.” Though the argument has been made that the influence and involvement of Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan may have had more to do with the band’s successes than the work of its official membership, I wondered how it was even permissible for her to utilize the name. Surely there had to be legal hurdles to be dealt with that couldn’t be dismissed without consent from former members. (I mean, Axl Rose effectively destroyed Guns N’ Roses by compelling his bandmates to relinquish all rights to the name.) So I’ve been waiting for Erlandson or someone from Hole’s management to comment on Love’s unilateral decision to shamelessly cash-in on the Hole brand. Well, at last, he has:

Furthermore, guitarist Erlandson insists a contract Love signed with him in 2002 bans her from using the name Hole for any future ventures, unless he’s involved. He tells Spin magazine, “We have a contract. She signed a contract with me when we decided to break up the band, which was like 2002 or something, so I really don’t have comment on it except that I know my part in that band. The way I look at it, there is no Hole without me. To put it blunt. Just on a business level… Somebody told me (about Love’s plans) and it just sounds like something… it just sounds like the usual. I love her a lot and I wish her the best, and I’m open to discussions regarding the real Hole, and if she has a solo album together, I think that’s great. I think she should finish it and put it out and do that.”

Of course, Love has responded to this seemingly sound logic with her usual grace, tact, and impeccable grammar… via Twitter.
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Paleozoic UK-based periodical NME reported today that Courtney Love will release her long-delayed second solo record as a Hole album. Apparently, none of the band’s other members will actually perform on the record, save for a possible appearance on backing vocals by Hole’s last bassist Melissa auf der Maur. With a brazen move that would make Burton and Dino blush, the Gratest Bloggre On Earht has effectively delivered a huge fuck you to co-founder Eric Erlandson by co-opting the name in an attempt to save her perpetually disintegrating career.

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