![]() Skittering break beats, club synths and grindcore guitars are tapped together, collage style. Reznor dials up the chills with pauses of plucking synths and just-under-the-surface roiling until - boom - the machine starts up again: “I am the needle in your vein/ I am the high you can’t sustain/ I am the pusher, I’m a whore/ I am the need you have for more.” There isn’t a more on-the-nose song about Reznor’s pain and drug addiction during this era.Ī sampler of sounds come together here, sounding like a warped far-future version of Depeche Mode (some of the sessions were produced by that band’s longtime collaborator, Flood). Once we get passed the opening beats (well, beatings), the song becomes a clattering razor edge with stabbing guitars. It’s three minutes and 22 seconds of rest, of cuddling and comfort, buffering the raw blasts in between. This instrumental song - a, ahem, nod to the warm, safe place provided by a heroin high? - is exactly as its inspiration would suggest: slow-burning, gorgeous, comforting, blissed-out. One of the more experimental, arty songs on an album full of ‘em, “Eraser” is an epic of sound design - patchwork melodies and layered vocals rise and fall, with a barrage of sounds taking center stage, then recede into the darkness. When you hear this song, there’s no wonder Reznor went on to a very successful career in film soundtracks. Again, it’s a collision of layered sounds - how many tracks are really here? - proving again his genius with the technology at this finger tips. At 6:51, it’s the longest song on the album Reznor reportedly would have liked to have released as a single. Reznor’s lyrics don’t fare much better: “I am a big man (Yes I am)/ And I have a big gun/ Got me a big old dick and I/ I like to have fun/ Held against your forehead/ I’ll make you suck it.” Republicans, naturally, took this as an insult aimed at them, while Reznor claimed it was a dis at misogynistic hip-hop acts.įollowing from the preceding “Eraser” on Spiral, “Reptile” continues down a similarly ambitious musical path. Targeted by conservatives, including Senator and then Republican party leader Bob Dole, the song is a near-clichéd blast of industrial angst. The most controversial song on the album is also one of its worst. The LP’s melodic motifs reappear before being drowned out, but maybe that’s the point: Reznor is exhausted, and ready to set the stage for the closing act - the album’s final (and most beautiful and confessional track) “Hurt.” It’s 3:56 seconds of, perhaps, the most unremarkable atmospherics, acoustic noodling, and drowned-out electric guitar tangles on the entire album. Ranking its 15 tracks is tough-there are anthemic singles, haunting ballads, screeching guitar seizures, and atmospheric interludes. Reznor is a master of his technological domain. Revisiting the album 25 years later, one thing is clear: gritty and aggressive, but at times tender an atmospheric, it’s a musical masterpiece that hasn’t dated sonically - its production value is impressive, despite a quarter century of technological development in studio wizardry. Then, of course, there’s the multiple references to “Pig,” one of the words written on the door of the home, back on the fateful night in 1969, in their victims’ blood. Fitting, as the LP is themed around violence and self-flagellation, addiction and self-loathing. It opens with the sound of a man being beaten by a prison guard, sampled from the George Lucas film THX1138. Because Reznor has a better handle on dynamics now, the melodic core is more obvious than ever.Recorded in the Hollywood house where the Manson Family murdered five people, including actress Sharon Tate, the release turned Reznor into a massive star, one known for turning inward to unleash the demons from the dark corners of his mind. Suddenly the guitars fall away to reveal the sensually throbbing rhythm track below then that falls away to reveal a vocal-and-piano track that's as catchy as anything by Elton John. On the album's first single, "March of the Pigs," for example, Reznor screams about swine lined up for slaughter amid guitars screeching in pain. The Downward Spiral, Reznor builds his constructions of noise and gloom around warm, fuzzy melodies. Trent Reznor, who records the NIN albums almost entirely by himself (although he tours with a full band), tries very hard to pass himself off as an angry young man, but underneath the angst-ridden lyrics, pounding synths, and grating guitars is an irrepressible pop sensibility. It's easy to understand why Nine Inch Nails became the industrial band to break out of the techno ghetto and win a larger audience.
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