Hole - Celebrity Skin

Another of those whose singles got played a lot on triple j at the time when I was listening a lot to triple j, and so coloured by nostalgia, and whether by operation of that nostalgia or on their own merits, those songs, tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 - "Celebrity Skin", "Awful", "Hit So Hard", "Malibu" - still sound great. ("Awful" is still my favourite of the singles, and I think that it's the best song on the album.) For fuzzed out pop, I'd rather listen to Belly any day, and for arty punk anthems, of course there's Pretty Girls Make Graves and Sleater-Kinney. But Celebrity Skin mines a sort of modern rock seam which occupies the middle ground between those two styles (themselves not exactly diametrically opposed) and generally does it well, though it sometimes drags after the initial flurry.