POP MUSIC REVIEW : Hole: Angry Love Songs

“Did you just call me a whore?”

Courtney Love, the feisty lead singer of alternative-band-of-the-moment Hole, seemed genuinely miffed as she addressed the heckler in the Whisky’s capacity-plus crowd on Tuesday. “ That’s a cool thing to call a girl.”

Then again, Hole’s signature song, which Love sings in the first person, is called “Teenage Whore,” so perhaps the confused fan figured he was paying her a compliment, adopting her own presumed twisting of the language to turn an epithet into a term of endearment, as is the pop-culture custom from punks to gangstas.

Whoops. Love wasn’t, and isn’t, kidding around. When she sings “Teenage Whore”--the angry lead track of Hole’s debut album, “Pretty on the Inside,” and the third number of the punkish outfit’s uneven but riveting 45-minute Whisky set--she means it literally and, yes, unprettily.

Using a young hooker’s encounter with her mother as the story line, the harrowing tune first offers prostitution as an act of adolescent rebellion (“I feel so all alone, I wish I could die,” the girl spits), then, perhaps because that’s too obvious, throws in a dollop of futile teen materialism for good measure (“I wanted that shirt, I wanted those pants!” she screams, even as the mother assures the girl she would have provided anything).

By the time Love gets done growling this in a voice that rises--with predictable but consistently jarring dynamics--from a girlish murmur to an enraged howl, you may not know what you’ve heard but you know you’ve heard something, as the saying goes.

Things pretty much only get less erotic from there, in Hole’s world. Few rock bands, and few female-led bands in particular, have ever painted a less seductive picture of sexuality, with imagery of rape, abortion and misguided subservience among the lyrics. Feminist? Probably. Revisionist? Definitely.

Hole’s very name, of course, suggests both sexuality and some aching existential void. Love has claimed either interpretation exclusively at times--probably depending on who’s asking; she’s certainly a crafty enough sort--but listen to the lyrics long enough and you’ll be convinced that it’s both, simultaneously.

To this confusion, add the image of Love on stage wearing a lovely white dress with a bow on the back, which, from a distance, seemed to blend with her pale skin and platinum hair into one ghostly apparition--but for the cake of red lipstick that quickly smeared from its proximity to the microphone.

In less capable hands this look could have seemed teasingly Lolita-esque, but with Love’s cocky charisma became more of a rock ‘n’ roll uniform instead.

At times, there seemed to be too much charisma, not enough chops. Love’s anger is plenty theatrical, that’s for sure. It was funny when she kept taking time out to mock other groups like Pearl Jam and the Nymphs, and anyone who would buy their records. But her subsequent pointless exchanges with hecklers (Pearl Jam fans, presumably) and ultimate sign-off to the crowd with a sarcastic curse left a sour taste, even if that’s post-punk show-biz.

The quartet achieves a remarkable intensity in its best moments, and the players are competent enough for the style, but the plethora of pounding, mid-tempo numbers resulted in a mid-set backup, kind of like LAX during a rainstorm.

The conceptualization here is a little ahead of the music itself. But Love is a figure whose attitude-inizing seems to come out of some real-life experience, however melodramatically it’s expressed, and this marks her as far more promising than the pack.

Beware, though: With that guttural rasp, sounding at times like early Alice Cooper times 10, Love’s voice--which she duly noted was going out Tuesday--will be lucky to make it even to Hole’s inevitable major-label debut in a year or two.