Trent Reznor and I are on a first-name basis. At least, in my head we are. After all, we’ve been through a lot together, he and I. For example, there was that period of my life where I was on-again-off-again dating that lesbian girl who didn’t know she was a lesbian yet. Let me tell you, those were difficult times. Thank God I had my friend Trent, “Something I Can Never Have,” and the repeat button.
I know, I know—this review is starting off on the wrong track. I’m heading into Pitchfork territory here. But I promise you there’s no snark-fueled 5.5 score waiting for you at the end. Because we’re so close, me and Trent, I care about him, unlike those other guys. That’s also why I ask him to clean up his act every once in a while.
Giving away music for free is a great start. Trent has been doing amazing things for the music industry as a whole. Let’s see here: Told fans to steal his music because his label was charging too much—check. Leaked advance tracks of then-new album “Year Zero” via creepy bathroom USB sticks—check. Produced and performed on Saul William’s incredible 2007 album “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust,” gave it away in high quality, and for damned-near free—check. Released a two-disc instrumental album, “Ghosts I-IV,” in a sneak attack and sold it for lunch money—check. And now, only a month later, he releases another surprise 10-track album, “The Slip,” this time costing you only the time it takes to download.
Trent also gets major points for keeping the art of noise-as-music alive. Few artists (See Portishead’s amazing "Third") can make high-pitched drones, metallic shrieks, and pitchless analog growls sound this damned good. It’s a rare talent that can take sounds that, if heard on their own will cause migraines, and turn it into a product that people willingly pay for—that is, when Trent is charging.
Take the album’s intro track, “999,999,” for example. The entire track is noise—all squelching synths, subway tunnel white noise, and hissing steam—layered over a stuttering sample of Trent’s voice, asking “How did I slip into?”
The following track, “1,000,000,” is a full-blown stomper, but it’s also where the album starts to run into trouble. Only four lines into the album (five if you count the sample in the first track), and already we’re back to the “on your hands and knees” shit.
Trent’s strong point has never been his lyrics. He’s a brilliant composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer, but when it comes to that one thing with the words and stuff, Nine Inch Nails albums fall flat. His lyrics were serviceable on early albums, and for one brief moment, everything came together when he recorded “The Downward Spiral,” an album with very specific and very dark imagery. It’s been downhill ever since then, though. Clichés, heavy-duty rhyming, and lyrics so vague as to be meaningless are a dime-a-dozen these days.
Exhibit A—From the album’s first single, “Discipline”: “And now it’s starting up/feels like I’m losing touch/nothing matters to me/nothing matters as much.” Huh? There were 18 words in those four lines and yet nothing was said.
Exhibit B—From the track “Echoplex,” released prior to the full album via a Facebook application: “I’m safe in here/irrelevant/just like they said.” On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with these lyrics, until you look at the themes that cross over from album to album. Who the hell is “They”? It seems there’s always someone or something holding Trent down, watching him, or putting him in his place. Maybe it’s a gender-neutral you. Maybe it’s “The Presence.” Maybe it’s God Himself.
Whatever it is that Trent blames, I’m guessing from the volume of work that he has released in the past year that the only thing that was ever holding Trent down was himself. Giving up drugs and alcohol seems to have done wonders for his productivity. Now I’ve just got to figure out what vice it is that keeps him from writing lyrics that actually touch on something meaningful and human. Is it cigarettes? Coffee? Video Games?
See, I was really hoping that hanging out with Saul Williams would teach Trent a thing or two about poetry. Them’s the breaks, I guess.
Each new Nine Inch Nails release brings a strange mixture of anticipation and gearing myself up for disappointment. Listen to the music minus the vocals, and you’re hearing some of the best music you’ll ever hear. Trent’s that good. But if you were to do the opposite and stick a lyric sheet in front of me with no music to back it, I’d crumple it up and throw it in the trash.
Musically, there are so many great moments on this album. “Letting You” is the fastest, most frantic song we’ve heard from Nine Inch Nails since “March of the Pigs.” The beat trips all over itself trying to keep up, fuzzed-out bass throbs underneath the screaming-crowd chorus, and seriously, how can you go wrong with pew-pew laser synths? But then there’s those lyrics again. Rhyming feed, bleed, need, and greed. We already did that on “The Fragile,” and I cringed in 1999 too.
The strongest point on the album is the back-to-back duo of the piano-driven “Lights in the Sky,” where the piano is so damp it’s rotting, and the instrumental track it melts into, “Corona Radiata.” “Corona” is over seven minutes long, and it spends its first five building and growing. It’s all ambience at first, constantly shifting and morphing, like a soundtrack to the northern lights. At roughly four minutes in, a distant, distorted drum loop pushes its way over the horizon and begins some building of its own, until it owns the track. If the first four minutes brought us the northern lights, what comes next is the storm that blackens out the sky. Droning synths and warped bass filter in, rising in volume and clarity alongside the drum loop, until the song closes out in a shitstorm of what sounds like screaming cats and crying babies.
I give my buddy Trent a lot of crap, but as long as he keeps writing songs like “Corona Radiata,” I’ll keep listening no matter what kind of awful lyrics he writes. And even if he keeps releasing a new album every three days, I’ll keep paying. If he’s charging, that is.
