Nine Inch Nails

Nine Inch Nails have released their best album since 1999’s The Fragile. Essentially Trent Reznor with several guest musicians and producers, Nine Inch Nails gets as much attention for the circumstances surrounding their music as the music itself, and The Slip’s release as free download continues the non-musical melodrama.

The Slip shows Reznor at the top of his industrial techno/metal/punk hybrid game, and his marketing savvy as well. He knows his fanbase (which by now could be intergenerational); he knows his style; and he knows his limitations.

Musically the album’s post-Downward Spiral progression resembles With Teeth with its wide lyrical strokes and taught alt-metal musicianship. Again like With Teeth, The Slip has several nods to the band’s first, and most punk, album Pretty Hate Machine. Pretty Hate Machine has 80’s written all over its jangly synths, The Police-on-speed beats, and electronic beeps, and all of the formal albums since The Fragile have revisited those sounds through the lens of the mainstream destroying sounds of The Downward Spiral to varying degrees of effectiveness. On The Slip, the progression is fully developed. “Discipline” is the rock radio favorite, and recalls With Teeth and Pretty Hate Machine most clearly. The track’s driving guitar and drums paced with trademark keyboards brusquely grab the listener by the arm and lead, willingly or not, to a hard rock fan’s nirvana.

Since The Downward Spiral’s infinite number of remix EP’s and The Fragile’s indulgent double-album sprawl, it seems like Reznor was always just on the verge of painting himself into a corner creatively, releasing so many experimental interpretations of his work that one had to wonder if there was anything left for him to do musically. The Slip’s answer is to do everything better with just enough subtle differences to please hardcore fans.

The Slip starts with “999,999” as an instrumental precursor to track two’s “1,000,000.” The idea being some sort of quiet dramatic lead-up to “1,000,000”s hard guitar driven barn burner, in which Reznor laments, “I feel a million miles away/ I don’t feel anything at all.” “Letting You” is as hard as anything in the band’s vast catalogue, including “March of the Pigs,” but it is more guitar than synth driven, and even features a metallic guitar solo. “Echoplex” is best described as complicated, with a complete mood change 2/3 through.

“Head Down” and “The Four of Us Are Dying” shows off Reznor’s Kanye-like ability to make futuristic N.E.R.D.-y beats (although, somehow Reznor’s work with rappers like Saul Williams never seems to pan out). “Lights in the Sky” is Reznor’s version of a ballad, where he sings of a lost love, forgoing his shopworn nihilism. “Corona Radiata” is the familiar anti-Enya instrumental track. “Demon Seed” ends the album with a funked-out electronic beat fest, another track to please NIN’s electronic-oriented fans.

Lyrically, Reznor still loves his anti-religion double entendres, “Get down on your knees,” still hates consumerism, “You want what you’re looking at,” still is nihilistically detached, “This is not my face/ this is not my life/ there is nothing here/ that I recognize,” and still advocates being on the wagon, “I need to discipline/ once I start I cannot stop myself.” Conspicuous in absence are Year Zero’s violent anti-God/George W. Bush screeds. Overall, the album’s lyrics are creatively on par with Reznor’s body of work, but generally less angry for its own good. Only “Lights in the Sky” stands out with its rare selflessness and vulnerability.

Some might see NIN’s release of this album as a free download as even more altruistic than Radiohead’s “suggested donation” for In Rainbows (with its tattle-tale page listing how much each donor gave).  It is a fair point, because this album will be as well-received by NIN fans as In Rainbows was by Radiohead fans; The Slip is no slop-bucket of b-sides or all instrumental leftovers. It is the latest NIN album. Free. Conversely, given the hurricane-force winds of change in the filesharing-addled music industry, NIN may have had to one-up Radiohead’s headline grabbing generosity to stay on the cutting edge or risk becoming trite and overdone.

Highlight Track: “Discipline”

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