THE SPIN TOP 40: THE MOST VITAL ARTISTS IN MUSIC TODAY #6-Hole The year's most anticipated record, up close and personal. In the lounge area of a midtown Manhattan recording studio, a TV set absently scrolls the closing credits of the mondo blockbuster movie TITANIC. Hole bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur and guitarist Eric Erlandson are plopped down, tired and comfortable, thumbing through fashion magazines while awaiting their band leader, numb at this point to the irony of the videotape flickering in the background. Next door, Courtney Love is winding up her evening's work, hoping to better a previous vocal take for a bracing new track called "Northern Star," one of the 13 set to appear on the long, long, long- awaited follow-up to 1994's benchmark Live Through This. Hole have traveled to New York at the behest of homesick producer Michael Beinhorn (Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers) to finally wrap up a record that Love has take to calling, half-jokingly, "our Titanic," a record that has cost a Cameron-esque amount of time and money, that's taken on rumors like the luxury liner took on water, and whose stakes, like those of the movie, are frighteningly high. Briefly: can the most controversial woman in rock'n'roll history (think about it) create a record that proves once and for all (or again) that her artistry is equal to her fame? Can she vacation from rock, swim with Hollywood sharks and play dress-up for Anna Wintour, and then come back with any edge, with any cred, with any burning desire to start fires? Four years on with grunge now nostalgia, with rock in a dip, with Lilith ascendant, with 30 in the rearview, does Courtney Love still matter? We won't know the full answer until the new album, slated for a June 2nd release, succeeds or doesn't in the marketplace, but early listens bode well: The new record is a rich, complicated, and even mature work that succeeds like a top-notch Hollywood film, balancing act, craft, and commerce so deftly you don't notice the perpetual tug-of-war. The darkness is still there, but it's melted from anger to sadness; singing has elbowed aside Love's gasoline-gargle; and a dusky pop-rock bitersweetness - think Big Star or Fleetwood Mac - has largely supplanted the growl of grunge. If Live Through This was a jagged-edged memory-glass of being out-of-control and twentysomething in Seattle, then the new album chronicles a sober thirtysomething's L.A aftermath, a choir of ghosts singing back-up. Call it Pretty On The Outside. A little later that evening, vocals in the can, Love sits down to a light back and shoulder massage from her voice coach and a discussion with her bandmates over how best to attribute the somewhat amorphous writer/arranger role played on the record by Billy Corgan. ("Do we really have to go there?" asks Erlandson. "Why not say he really helped on some songs and leave it at that," responds Love.) The album is still weeks away from completion-backing vocals not yet in place, strings to be added, title to be determined-but it's not too soon for the band to provide quick rundowns on some of the album's more surefire numbers: "Reasons To be Beautiful" Love: "One morning I wrote down the phrase REASONS TO BE BEAUTIFUL, and I listed them, and then I wrote down the phrase REASONS TO BE UGLY, and I listed them." Auf Der Maur: "That song has my favorite lyrics of yours on the record." Love: "[sings] "Ten good reasons to stay alive/ Ten good reasons that I can't find."" Auf Der Maur: "We were going to call the record Reasons to be Beautiful at one point." Love: "But I was afraid it was too beauty magazine." "Malibu" Erlandson: "That's our Topanga Canyon summer song." Love: " There's a lot of geography on this record. I've had this whole relationship with Malibu, it's one of my towns, it's one of my love affairs. It's such a Malibu song, a rehab-by-goes-to-the-ocean song. [sings] "Hey baby, I'm gonna rescue you/ I'm gonna set you free, tonight." The whole rescue-you, dig-me-out thing. I love that." "Northern Star" Love: " I had gone to see the David Fincher movie The Game, and I really wanted to do this new movie of his, Fight Club, and I was thinking about what a dark bastard Fincher was, and I was really competitive about it. So when Eric started playing the melody, the lyrics just came from this wellspring of 'all right, you dark bastard, I'll show you wretched.'" "Sugar Coma" Love: "It's from our Unplugged days. It started out all peppy and poppy, but then Jeff Buckley died, and it became a homage to Evan [Dando] and Jeff and Brain Wilson. It's all about self-destructive pop boys." "Celebrity Skin" (the title refers to a particularly craven Hollywood glam-pop band from the early 90's) Erlandson: "The song sums up that whole scene so well." Love: "It was getting dark outside in Hollywood, and we were in the rehearsal room. We had successfully polished off a song and these guys were like, 'What do you want to write about now?' And I said, 'I want to write about L.A.' and Eric said, 'You always want to write about L.A.' So the song came like that [snaps her fingers]. 'Cause those lyrics are just funny and easy. I really like the 'hooker/waitress,''model/actress' lines. But then there's a second part that goes 'No second billing / 'Cause you're a star now,' which was really stupid for me to have written. But it just came out. What was I gonna do?" 1997 ranking: 8 - Craig Marks, SPIN, May, 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - -