1/17/2024 0 Comments Lyrical shoes![]() Hailed as one of the greatest live blues records ever captured, Rocks the House showcases an equally magnetizing but different side of James, whose strength as a balladeer was already popularized on stunning studio tracks like "A Sunday Kind of Love" and "At Last." On stage at the New Era Club, which James hand-picked specifically for these recordings, the 25-year-old attacks each song with the perfect storm of fire and grit. These performances comprise her first live album, Rocks the House, released the following year. On September 27 and 28th, 1963, Etta James howled her way through juke-joint blues, soul, and R&B numbers at the New Era Club in Nashville. The rare mix of swagger and fragility on Pirates makes it clear how underrated Rickie Lee Jones has been, and how much we still need her now. (Take that, Springsteen.) Add to that a breakup with Tom Waits and a move to New York to bring hard-earned life experience to the forefront - the opening piano notes of "We Belong Together" signal the beautiful, melodic drama about to unfold: "I say this was no game of chicken / You were aiming at your best friend." Characters shine in pictures so vivid it's remarkable they were squeezed into song structure: "Eddie's got one crazy eye / That turns him into a cartoon / When a pretty girl comes by," she sings. On Pirates, Jones refined the sonic stew of jazz, pop and R&B that earned her the Best New Artist Grammy Award, adding lyrical finesse in the form of high-culture nods and colorful street smarts that fly by so fast you nearly miss them. Her startling debut and "Chuck E's In Love" made Rickie Lee Jones a fast-rising star, but her follow-up album, which came two years later, proved to be her masterwork. Live Through This solidifies Love's place as one of rock music's most magnetic front people and a high-octane performer from the raucous opener "Violet" to the sentimental and critical "Rock Star." A fellow force to be reckoned with, Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna famously offered the riot grrl rallying cry "Find the biggest bitch in town and start a band with her." Courtney Love took that one step further, as though suggesting: Be the bitch. At its heart is the turmoil of a new feminist punk revolution, images of beauty made ugly-pretty by Love's brassy vocals and distaste for expectation, tales of postpartum depression and tender lyrics revealing a female reality deemed unacceptable in the grunge rock boy's club Hole and Love operated outside of. Often viewed in the shadow of Kurt Cobain but built to eclipse it, the album is a mosaic of songs piecing together the band's former noise-grunge sound ("She Walks On Me") with an accessible rock melodicism ("Doll Parts"). ![]() Released on Apseven days after her late husband's suicide, Live Through This is the first major label release and most definitive work by Courtney Love and her band Hole.
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