Anyone who has known me for longer than two hours knows that I have been a borderline obsessive Nine Inch Nails fan since I was old enough to ride my bike to local record stores and buy their CD's. I've always felt like they were a band that had an intricate universe of their own to explore and enjoy. There were all types of rare and unique experiences they offered in many different ways that 90% of radio bands did not offer. When a new NIN album comes out there seemed to be an extensive amount of work putting into album artwork, music videos, live production, and of course good music. It seems Trent has long left those days of carefully crafting unique music (for Nine Inch Nails) behind him. I sat down and gave this album about twenty listens from start to finish before I blurted out how much I loved or hated the day it was leaked online, as I saw thousands of people online did. This band to me has always been a much more personal listening experience than just hearing the "new hit single" on the radio and spewing out your dipshit opinion 20 seconds into the first track.
In my opinion, good musicians always surprise you with brand new batch of music with similar core ingredients. It's the same role comedians have to take on. A good comic can't come out and simply a variation of the same jokes expecting laughs and it's just the same for musicians who can't keep re-releasing the same material. I knew that the new NIN would sound nothing like his most recent releases (and thank fucking God for that) but I was still hoping it wouldn't be different in such an awful way.
Let's just get straight to it, this album fucking sucks. It was a huge disappoint not only as a huge Nine Inch Nails fan, but as a fan of good music in general. I was by no means hoping to hear Trent recycle any old guitar parts, lyrics, or melodies from previous albums, I was just hoping the album didn't sound like fucking club music. The reason Trent is such a hero of mine musically is because he always reinvents himself in an appealing way. To me, it seems he was trying too hard to NOT sound like his old music to be able to say he was trying something different. His music always gave me a visual of his studio work flow. I could always envision all the different live drummers, session guitarists, pianists, and it always made the album more appealing. All I can picture is Trent on his laptop with headphones making this incredibly stale sounding record. It was always great to hear organic instruments get married up with electronics.. but I think on this album Trent kept all of his guitars and live drummers out of the studio.
The first single was "Came Back Haunted" which I felt was incorrectly named. The title should have been "Came Back Dance Pop" because there isn't anything "haunting" about this song. The video was done by a hero of mine David Lynch. When I first heard of the collaboration I pissed myself a little. What could be better? Trent makes weird but interesting music and David does the same for film. This video sincerely pissed me off. Apparently Michael J. Fox was camera man for this sack of shit video and Trent's three year old son Lazarus must have been responsible for the visuals because it just looks flat out silly.
So why bother even giving it one star let alone 1.5 after all the shit I'm talking on it? I do respect any human being who is their own person, especially if it isn't naturally a particular popular style. I think it would have been easy for Trent to come back with live drums and screaming guitars and please the "true fans" but I think the true fans understand that the only reason they have respect for Trent is because his music was something he personally felt to be right. The more I read and listened to his explanations of the albums creative process the less I could justify actually liking the music. It basically sounds like he made a bunch of electronic demos on his laptop over the course of a few months, got a handful of extremely talented musicians to turn the album into something live and then abruptly went back to everything sounding like someone who just recently purchased a drum machine.
I did also find it to be refreshingly different that the album was released in two different mastering formats. One release is made for people who put the album on their iPod and play it through their computer speakers that are probably plugged in backwards without really detecting any differences in the audio quality at all. You can turn it all the way without any of the frequencies fighting for your ears attention. The other format is not necessarily meant to played at a loud volume but preserves the full range. So basically one sounds cool loud and the other sounds fucking amazing at a more reasonable level. That to me is something brand new for national acts to take part in and was a cool thing to hear about.
This track is hands down the best Nine Inch Nails track since The Fragile in 1999. I had goosebumps throughout, it had new elements old tracks did not and was just down right a damn good song. The music evolved from electronic to a gritty live band sound and the lyrics instantly struck a main vein for me. It to me is what makes a great Nine Inch Nails song. It tells a story both musically and lyrically, it starts in one place and ends up in another and it gets stuck in your head! My only "complaint" on the song was the trend this album has of overusing the seemingly exact same club music drum sequence, but when the live drums and guitars kick in near the end all is well again. In my eyes, this song is the one track that Trent kept of the failed experiment of creating a live band around the electronic based record.
Now to be fair, other tracks on this album did grow on me a tiny bit, but they were of no comparison to this track or his lyrical content on.. pretty much With Teeth (2005) and back. When I heard tracks like "A copy of a" I could not stop from laughing. The music sounded like someone programmed the song on ecstasy and the lyrics make Lady Gaga look like a fucking poet. The song "Satellite" is a great example of how fucking awful this album is. The music sounds like it was made in twenty minutes in Garageband by a stoned teenage girl and the lyrics were clearly an inspiration while Trent sat on Google Maps while stalking someone. Lyrically the album makes it clear he doesn't have much to say in the vein of Nine Inch Nails anymore.. so my advice is don't! He'll moan a few corny lines and then it's followed up by extremely over used delay and effects.
By in large, it was great to see Trent challenging his audience in a different way but I felt this was far too far of a leap for people who aren't deaf to get into. The video above is Trent in 1997 before the Fragile had been released and he explains that if a record is "safe" that it's ridiculous. That was when he claimed the Fragile was to be a much more hip hop sounding record, and then didn't. That's exactly the attitude I respect and feel has been pulled off on his records before, just not as of too recent. I feel he's getting lazier and lazier when it comes to writing Nine Inch Nails music. His soundtrack work is impeccable on the other hand.
For someone that I've always drew inspiration from on a writing and recording aspect of music for tips and tricks, he really seems to be relying too heavily on laptop sounding plug-ins and almost factory preset sounding sequences. There's no soul anymore! It's just radio pop now! He's missing the grit and girth that even his soundtrack work with Atticus Ross has had. The album is definitely worth a listen if you're curious, but I would go into listen to the album as if it were a dance pop album so you're not disappointed.
Trent, my man.. STOP! Make soundtracks, make breakfast for your lovely children and make love to your gorgeous wife. You said yourself that if you found yourself to be a radically different human being that it would be time to do something else. Do that. I think he came to that conclusion when he formed How to Destroy Angels but when it didn't make half the sales a new NIN record would, it was time for a comeback!
-Novak