|
Spiralling towards Crap By Thom Denick After having fans wait five years for a new album length release from Nine Inch Nails, it would seem safe to assume Trent Reznor would have came up with something interesting. Maybe a release which wades into new waters of Reznor's trademark industrial instrumentals, or perhaps some ground breaking pop music, as the last release, "The Downward Spiral" did with it's billboard singles "Closer," "Hurt," and "March of the Pigs." Reznor had yet to let his long term fans down with an Halo release. The newest Halo, Number 14, is entitled "Fragile," and it marks the beginning of what may well indeed become a "downward spiral " for the immensly popular Reznor and Co. "Fragile," put simply, is pop garbage. It's uninventive, too long, boring, and unoriginal. Perhaps the opposite of what most had come to expect from "The Nails." From Trent 's mindlessly rhyming and repetitive lyrics, to the refusal to go anywhere new with the lengthy release's 23 songs. Both CD's played together run about 100 minutes, and maybe ten mintues of that 100 is worth listening to. To start, the lyrics. Absolutely worthless. On "Pretty Hate Machin" we heard: "God money's not looking for the cure... ...God money let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised...
...Head like a hole, Black as your soul, I'd Rather Die, Than give you control." On "Burn" we head: "No new tale to tell, Twenty six years on my way to hell. " And the "Downward Spiral" made its first single's chorus a school yard chant: "I want to fuck you like an animal... I want to feel you from the inside... You get me closer to God..." All of these songs not only had interesting lyrics, but also had impressively original industrial music backing it up. "Fragile" has neither. The lyrics confine themselves to patheticily immature forms of verse, which painfully forces rhymes into Reznor's usually charged music. When Reznor isn't making sure his songs fit AABCBCAA verse, he's repeating now tired lines from other albums. "Nothing can stop me now," would be the rallying cry of this album, if it hadn't already been used up on "The Downward Spiral." By the time Reznor gets halfway though his CD, the songs become unlistenable and ridiculously mundane. Here are the entire lyrics to "The Way Out is Through. " "All I've undergone I will keep on Underneath it all We feel so small The heavens fall But still we crawl All I've undergone I will Keep on. " And it goes on. There are no truly memorable lines or lyrics from this ablum. The marvelously apathetic first single, "The Day the World Went Away, " is not only the antithesis of the angry grind of "Closer," but it also sounds like a potential Volkswagon commercial; The last four lines being, "Na Na Nah, Na Na Na Nah... " And that is ignoring the fact that longtime co-conspirator Marilyn Manson's earlier diatribe on the apocalypse, "The Last Day on Earth," off the release "Mechanical Animals," is embarrasingly more interesting, complex, and exciting then Reznor's. What about the music? With a few rare exceptions, "Fragile" offers no noticibley new or interesting twists on the industrial scene. "Somewhat Damaged," the opening track, does start off in the right way, a strange and hard hitting industrial sound, but it quickly digresses into sounding like a "B Side" from "Pretty Hate Machine." In fact, almost every song seems to have some kind of connection to another album. Unfortuantely, the allusion to previous works doesn't work quite as well here as say, the Beastie Boys manage to succesfully work into their CD's. The result is a tired mix of old sounds with some odd and disgusting pop sensibility mixed in. Listening to this CD closely with headphones reveals nothing new, and only makes the frustrating lack of anything good more obvious. There is nothing even close to the marvelous straw sucking sound which brought the start of the fifteen minute instrumental on "The Downward Spiral." Trent doesn't seem willing to experiment with new sounds, and instead injects the NIN with a pop sound. The result is a completely unsuccesful album marring the record of one of the most interesting bands of the end of this century. I just wish he didn't have to waste two CD's to do it. Halo Release Number 12 was a video collection called "Closure." The rumors running around were that Reznor was ending Nine Inch Nails, and recording exclusively instrumentals and releasing them under his own name, abandoning NIN (As he did on "The Lost Highway Soundtrack"). It's unfortunate these rumors weren't true. An instrumental-only CD would likely have been much more interesting then "Fragile" can manage, even at it's best moments. If you're looking for something good to listen to, pass "Fragile" by. If you still want "Nails," find an old copy of "Quake," it 's got some of Trent's best instrumentals hidden as the background music of the game. Thom Denick is a senior film major at Ithaca College. |
