America's Sweetheart

Artist: Courtney Love
Label: Virgin Records Us
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Clean
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 724359452920
EAN: 0724359452920
ASIN: B00014K636

Release Date: 2004-02-10

America's Sweetheart

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General

| Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

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General

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Pop Rock

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Tracks:

Mono
But Julian, I'm a Little Older Than You
Hold On To Me
Sunset Strip
All The Drugs
Almost Golden
I'll Do Anything
Uncool
Life Despite God
Hello
Zeplin Song
Never Gonna Be the Same

Customer Reviews:

The Best Album of 2004 - Courtney Love's Finest Album.......2006-11-10

This CD picks up were Celebrity Skin left off, with one delightful surprise, it is twice as loud. It is nice to hear a real Rock N Roll cd in an age when wannabe pop stars like The Strokes and Britney Spears are spitting out pop garbage and lardassed record executives are promoting them as Rock, or even more scary, "Newer Rock". Not since 1994's "Live Through This" has Love produced such a cd with both pop rock appeal and some guitar work loud enough to wake the dead. The songs are as well crafted as on "Celebrity Skin", and this CD seems to start where "Celebrity Skin" left off, with more punktastic appeal. The CD opens with "Mono" a sonic punch, similar to "Celbrity Skin"s
opening track "Celebrity Skin". With the second track, it's another Sonic assult with "But Julian Im A Little Bit Older Than You". The next two songs "Hold On To Me" and "Sunset Strip" sound like they could have been on Celebrity Skin with that perfect mix of acoustic and electric edge that only Courtny Love or Robert Plant and Jimmy Page really can pull off without a hitch. "All The Drugs" is another sonic tune your sure to groove to. "Almost Golden" is classic Hole - Love acoustic electric style song but with one catch, Courtney Love has evolved her style since Hole and you can appreciate it with this tune. The rest of the CD continues with this sweet and loud mix of stories about life and mixing up the acoustic/ electric and electric/sonic masterpieces. One of my favorites is "I'll Do Anything", a classic Courtney Love style song with sprinklings of Courtney's own self styled catchprhases here and there. "Zeplin Song" seems to be a hilarious story about that pesky guitar miestro that everyone knows who tries to be Page, EVERY NIGHT, and another one of my favorite tracks "Hello", a great upbeat rock song with some sexy lyrics. This CD is strong, loud, delicate, and consistant with its delivery from the first to the last track. All the nerds that gave this CD less than stellar ratings need to get off thier buts and move out of thier moms basements or go to a punk show or something, because only the most square anti-feminist macho males seemed to be irritated by this CD! And Linda Perry?, the producer who did not seem like this CD at all, well what do you expect from the Britney Spears camp, an endorsement? Matt Serletic did a fantiastic job of producding this album, it is as professional as any Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones album. This CD is as loud as THE VOICE OF GOD! Don't let any little greasy four eyed computer geek nerd's review or any Britney Spears fan make your choices for you, not with this CD! Many critics are NERDS anyway, they hate Punk Rock! If you liked Hole, you will love this CD. If you like Courtney Love, you will love this CD. It is almost 2007 and in the last 7 years I still have yet to see another rock and roll cd that kicks out the jams like this one! Five Stars Courtney you came through for us yet again!

A Good Album but..........2006-06-11

Why realese a 'clean' version? The lyrics are a little questionable, the cussing is nothing compared to songs like 'All The Drugs'.

Nobody's "Sweetheart".......2005-12-25

"I'm overrated, desecrated/still somehow illuminated/I know I've got a screw loose..." Courtney Love is better known for her rocker-wild behavior than for her music. But hopes were high when Love brandished her solo debut after leaving her old band Hole. Were the hopes justified? Frankly, no -- tepid rock, tepid songs and close-to-snapping vocals litter "America's Sweetheart."

It starts off with a bang -- or, more specifically, with a sizzling bassline laced with distortion. For a few minutes, Love's sneering brand of singing is fun to listen to. But then she starts to deteriorate, stumbling through the embarrassing "But Julian, I'm A Little Bit Older Than You" ("I see Paris, I see France/I can see your underpants"), and struggling through the passable, semi-balladic "Hold On To Me" and "Sunset Strip."

Love launches herself back into rock turf with the cringeworthy "All The Drugs," the forgettable "I'll Do Anything," and the juvenile "Uncool ("I wanna be uncool!/Cuz I'll have you" -- huh?). By the funereal "Life Despite God," Love sounds like a wreck, with hard-to-decipher vocals that yowl drunkenly. But she manages to pull it together for the poignantly confessional "Never Gonna Be The Same."

Courtney Love is one of those celebrities you either love or hate (or pity). So it's a little hard to be objective about her album. But "America's Sweetheart" doesn't manage to be a good album, solo or not. It's definitely a disturbing one, with Love announcing calmly, "With all of my love/with all of my money/it doesn't feel as good as the drugs." It only adds to the feeling of decay that permeates this album.

The music is pretty typical rock with some hard tinges, like the shattering basslines and background percussion. Certainly it has some high points, and taken by itself, it's some fairly solid music. But the songwriting is lacking. Love has some moments of gut-wrenching honesty ("You've gotta ride that black horse baby/through the depths of hell that I've been"), but most of it is juvenile and even silly. Who let her get away with lines like "I love the way your mouth fits mine/1-800-He's-So-Fine"?

Years of wild living haven't done wonders for Love's voice. Her voice is okay in the softer songs. But when she gets loud or holds a note, she deteriorates -- strained, incoherent, sometimes sounding like her vocal chords are disintegrating in mid-song. She also seems to have trouble holding on to the lyrics and carrying a tune. By the end of the album, she sounds as if she's either stoned or drunk.

"America's Sweetheart" is a deeply disturbing album -- laced with rabid vocals and silly songs, it's almost the soundtrack of a person in a downward spiral.

Does a "clean" Courtney Love album make sense to you?.......2004-07-04

Undoubtedly it is because I watched the film "Sylvia" right before I first heard this album, but when listening to "America's Sweetheart" it suddenly struck me that the story of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain is the flip side of what happened with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She is talented but he is more famous and her first great success is overshadowed by a suicide. You can read this as an argument that if Hughes had been the one to end his life that Plath would still have achieved prominence, because what matters in this world is that you get people to look at or listen to your work. It has been a decade since Cobain ended his life with a shotgun blast and Hole's "Live Through This" achieved acclaim as much through the notoriety of its apparent prescience as its powerful punk sound. Since then the widow Cobain's career has been a long line of tabloid scandals with not much to show on the musical side of the ledger. Well, boys and girls, that is all over now.

Here we have the "clean" version of "America's Sweetheart," but I have to say that the idea of cleaning up Courtney Love's songs for public consumption strikes me as pretty absurd. You think mommy plays the clean version for Frances Bean? More importantly, does excising a few bad words dilute the meaning of these songs? Not really, but just on principle that has to cost this one a rating star. But even cleaned up for the kiddies it is clear right from the opening blast of "Mono" that Love announces she is back with a vengeance and the primary target is her dearly departed husband:

Hey yeah we had everything
Vinyl in mono
And we looked the other way man
We were so dumb
Is this the part in the book that you wrote
Where I gotta come and save the day
Did you miss me
Did you miss me

By the time Love howls in the chorus "Oh god you owe me one more song/ So I can prove to you that/ I'm so much better than him" it becomes clear these songs are going to wallow in the wretched existence that has been her life for the past decade. She might be hurt, but she is also angry, and she proceeds to eviscerate just about every aspect of her "pornorific" life from to the "hard drugs and bad luck" to the "lots and lots of meaningless sex." The only thing she does not touch upon is motherhood, which simply proves that that by not singing about her daughter she gives away the most sacred part of her life. But as the opening chords of "I'll Do Anything" pointedly remind us, "America's Sweetheart" always comes back to the specter of Cobain and as the lyrics of "Hold On to Me" prove you do not have to go digging far to get the point:

Hey, this life is never fair
The angels that you need are never there
But sometimes he comes to me
In the dead of winter, dead of night
He's all that I can see.

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