Happy Halloween everybody, today we are looking at the first single off of Nine Inch Nails’ 2013 album, Hesitation Marks. Aside from having a spooky sounding title that fits perfectly with Halloween, this is one of my favorite NIN songs with Hesitation Marks being my favorite album. Most NIN fans would consider that last statement blasphemous, but in my opinion a lot of Reznor’s earlier albums don’t hold up as well now.
Let me first state that I have never been a huge NIN fan; I liked some of With Teeth and some of the other singles but they were never a project I really got into. Hesitation Marks was the first album of Reznor’s that I got into enough to listen the whole thing from beginning to end without skipping around. Even with this album I found that the majority of it felt more like a movie score to my ears, with the only tracks I was really interested in listening to outside the context of the album being Copy Of A, Find My Way and Came Back Haunted.
Came Back Haunted in particular is a good mixture of the 90’s Industrial Rock sound that NIN is known for with some more contemporary electronic elements including some Dubstep leaning bass wobbles. The lyrics to Came Back Haunted seem to be relating to a character in the vein of Victor Snowden, even making an allusion to Deep Throat. While on the surface the lyrics remind me a lot of the kind of conspiracy theory Rock songs Muse put out, their is also a more personal level relating to Reznor’s battle with addiction and depression.
Regardless of the lyrical meanings, this track is the perfect mix of threatening and
danceable that a NIN track should be. Like I said, I love the whole album, but this track is one of the best off of it, and easily the most digestible.
An Album a Day is posted 5 days a week, Monday-Friday
Today we are looking at the second EP in a trilogy that Nine Inch Nails is currently in the middle of. This EP is entitled Add Violence and for the most part lives more in the ambient and instrumental side of NIN’s discography. While there are vocals all over the album from Trent Reznor, the focus is really on the music for most of this EP’s five tracks.
First off, apparently this is the second EP to feature Atticus Ross as an official member of NIN; for those who don’t know Ross is a long time collaborator of Trent Reznor and has worked on NIN albums since With Teeth back in 2005. His touch doesn’t seem to be any more present on this EP than it has in the past so I think the officially adding him to the band is more of an overdue title change than an upgrade in role. The other thing that is interesting about the mechanics of this EP is that it is part of a trilogy of EPs set to be released within about a year of each other.
The first of this trilogy was Not The Actual Events in December of 2016 and the last is set to be released sometime in the end of 2017/ beginning of 2018. This release schedule mirror some other established artists like John Mayer who have decided to release their album in smaller chunks rather than all at once. It will be interesting to see if other artists follow this example that splits the difference between an old school album and the pop industry’s practice of just releasing singles.
The actual album reminds me a lot of Hesitation Marks, having a similar focus on ambient sections as a lot of the tracks on that album did. The first track, Less Than, is the only song the album that really feels like an Industrial Rock song, with the rest having the Industrial elements but being way more introspective. Reznor’s vocals on Less Than have a bit of an edge to them that compliments the distorted guitar driven, powerful instrumental.
Where he is raw and edgy sounding on Less Than, Reznor is really whispery and haunting on the rest of the album. The Lovers has a tone that reminds me of Find My Way from Hesitation Marks, having a really dark echoey soundscape of an instrumental as Reznor’s crooning fades in and out of the foreground. This Isn’t The Place has some synth stabs that sound a lot like an orchestral movie score and continues on the overall feel of The Lovers.
Despite Not Anymore being the most aggressive song on the album it still features Reznor’s vocals being slathered in reverb and delay. Because of Reznor’s vocals being so far in the background in winds up feeling more like an aggressive movement in a classical piece than anything else. That kind of sums up this album too, aside from the first track it feels a lot like a movie score.
The last track The Background World should end 6 minutes earlier. Literally everything after the 5:44 mark is drowned in so much static and hiss that it’s not even music anymore. Along with this the repeating loop that gets more and more distorted isn’t a perfect loop so it stutters every 10 seconds or so before continuing. I’m all for experimental noise music, but this is literally just noise for half of the song, if he had it on a fade out the whole time then maybe it would work better, but for me after about 5 minutes I have to cut the song off.
The EP is pretty cool to listen to, but aside from the first track the whole thing feels like a movie score more than anything. I think the idea is that the ambient music is supposed to represent sleep and the 6 minutes of noise at the end is Reznor trying to wake up, but it could have been executed better in my opinion. Overall it’s a solid EP with some minor issues that are easily remedied by skipping ahead on the last track.
