Review: Hesitation Marks / Nine Inch Nails

Hesitation Marks:
Rating: 5 Stars (Gold)    * * * * *


This was the album I was waiting for ever since I really started getting into music and collecting albums back in 2008.  NIN has been possibly my favorite artist for a long time, and has also been infamous for releasing albums between large periods of time, but with rewarding results.  So this album had a ton of pressure on it in my mind.  I am glad to say, I'm very happy with it.

With Ghosts I-IV, The Slip, and How to Destroy Angels, Trent Reznor seemed to be accepting his role as an independent minimal artist.  With this album however, he returned to a major label and released a full length LP.  No disrespect to How to Destroy Angels or those other two albums, I did enjoy those but I wouldn't have wanted NIN to stay like that forever.  At the same time, Hesitation Marks doesn't sound like a desperate return to an earlier period, it is entirely original sounding and melds a type of minimalism with NIN's classic dense layering.

The album opens with the track The Eater of Dreams, an instrumental prologue containing little more than a dark ambient pulse and distorted lyrics.  At the climax it leads directely into Copy of A, a slightly minimal but fast paced song to kick things off.  In it Reznor laments being a copy of a copy of a copy, a product of outside forces.  The synth that kicks in during the chorus adds a dramatic feel that also reminds me slightly of something that might be found in a Radiohead song.  Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac makes his first appearance in this song, playing guitar during the connecting segment between the chorus and the second verse.

Next up is Came Back Haunted, the album's lead single.  The song is very bouncy as Reznor tells of needing to hide something but being unable to help himself.  He experienced something dark and came back haunted to tell the tale.  The guitar work both in the second verses and the bridge are very NIN-y and declared to me a return to NIN form back when the song first came out.  This song also has a great music video directed by David Lynch to go with it.

Things slow down for a bit with the next song, Find My Way.  A very atmospheric and solemn song that accompanies a prayer to God.  In it, Reznor laments that he has gone astray and is determined to find his way.  A bed of underlying vocals creeps in during the second half and gives the song an almost angelic feel.

Things kick back up with All Time Low.  One of my favorites, it has a funky guitar and percussion, carrying a theme of indulging in the dark side of life, being another all time low.  The second half switches gears and sounds uplifting with a rising and falling synth as the vocals chant "stretch across the sky".  The change seems to either signify a rise out of the all time low and into the sky, or as the lyric "how did we get so high?" suggests, possibly replicating the feeling of being intoxicated and feeling a high.

The next track Disappointed begins with a minimal gallopy beat as layers creep in and out throughout the song.  Reznor seems to either be attacking people who are disappointed in him, or is giving a sardonic portrayal of someone who has disappointed many and is mocking them.  An unidentifiable stringed instrument plays in the outro in the same melody as the vocals.

Everything is possibly the most controversial song to hit the NIN fanbase.  The song sounds uncharacteristically happy and upbeat for something composed by Trent Reznor.  With a punk rock sound, Reznor sings "I survived everything".  A falling guitar riff reminiscent of The Cure is present in the second verse as he sings "wave goodbye, wish me well".  The outro begins to sound far away as Reznor continues "I am home, I am free, I believe".  It's hard to tell if this song is meant to be a genuine declaration of triumph or a sort of false redemption.

Satellite is another favorite of mine on the album.  A very poppy and dancable track that also sounds uncharacteristic of Nine Inch Nails.  As many have pointed out, the song's theme of being spied on by satellites is almost eerie seeing how it came out around the time of the NSA spying controversy.  The song is extremely catchy and the second chorus vocal harmonies remind me of a 90s era dance track.  In the latter portion, the song grows more sinister, repeating "I know you're up there somewhere".  The poppiness of this track and the previous track could perhaps be explained by the fact that they were the first two songs written and were originally planned for an NIN best-of pack that Reznor owed to Interscope.  Nonetheless, it is a fantastic song.

Starting with Various Methods of Escape, the album becomes more centered and focused on Trent Reznor as a person in the present.  Minimal in the versus and heavy in the chorus, the lyrics reflect on the difficulty of freeing oneself from life's difficult vices.  The bridge gets quiet in a style similar to Mr Self Destruct as he repeats "I think I could lose myself in here".  It then builds back up and leads into the next track.

The next track, Running, starts with a fast paced but subdued sounding gallop.  The protagonist is running from something in their life but is quickly running out of places to hide.  The synth plugin from Copy of A rejoins during the chorus.  Much of the song rides the line "I'm running out of places I can hide from this".  The song is a good standalone track while also serving as a sort of connector between Various Methods of Escape and I Would For You.

I Would For You is an intense track, with a chaotic thumping bass in the verses, and a heavy guitar with shouting in the choruses.  The synth from Running and Copy of A rejoins this song during the second verse.  I am interested who the "you" is that Reznor is willing to become someone else for.  His wife and kids?  Even God perhaps?  The songs strips down to a piano riff for the outro, leading directly into In Two.

In Two is one of the most violent sounding songs on the album.  Very chaotic beats accompany chopped up lyrics of a conversation between two different personalities.  One urges the protagonist to shed his skin and save himself.  The other urges him to become his disease.  Distorted vocals then chant about nature being violent and how that was someone else.  Lindsay Buckingham's guitarwork jumps in with a falsetto voice saying "it's getting harder to tell the two of you apart".  The bridge once again gets silent and repeats "I just don't know anymore".  It builds once more to a climax filled with rapidly changing synths and quickly spills into the final full song.

At the end of the album is the final song split across two tracks.  The bulk of the song is While I'm Still Here.  This song is mellow but dead serious, as Reznor seems to reflect on his life and confronts the idea that he will die someday, contrasting the earlier chants of "we will never die" in All Time Low.  More wonderful guitarwork by Buckingham and a smooth outro saxophone add to the ambiance of the song.  The final track is an instrumental outro to the song called Black Noise.  The loop from the previous song continues but something sounds different.  The baseline has become much more sinister as a wall of horrifying sound creeps in and devours everything.  Building to a loud climax, it suddenly cuts out, ending the song and album abruptly.

That is Hesitation Marks, a satisfying Nine Inch Nails album following years of build up.  Well done Mr Reznor!

Review: The Nine Inch Nails Catalog

Pretty Hate Machine
Rating: 4 Stars (Silver)    * * * *




Broken
Rating: 4 Stars (Silver)    * * * *




The Downward Spiral
Rating: 6 Stars (Diamond)  * * * * * *




The Fragile
Rating: 5 Stars (Gold)    * * * * *




With Teeth
Rating: 4 Stars (Silver)    * * * *




Year Zero
Rating: 5 Stars (Gold)    * * * * * 




Ghosts I-IV
Rating: 3 Stars (Blue)     * * *




The Slip
Rating: 4 Stars (Silver)    * * * *



Nine Inch Nails is one of my favorite music artists, if not my favorite.  No other artist is as consistent in delivering quality material for years.  On top of that, NIN albums are fulfilling to buy because of their beautiful packaging and artwork.  In order to review the newest album, which I'll do in the next post, I'm first going to review the catalog up to this point.

The debut album is Pretty Hate Machine, showing the early roots of NIN.  The sound of the album is early industrial and synthpop.  The songs Head Like a Hole, Down In It, Sin, and Ringfinger are my favorites on this album.  It is catchy, but is slightly inhibited by the self loathing lyrics at points, like on the song That's What I Get.  Still a great album.

The next is the Broken EP, a short but intense album.  This is the start of the sound that NIN is most known for, an intense burst of industrial rock anger.  The song Wish won Trent Reznor a grammy, though for me the best songs are Last, Happiness in Slavery, and Gave Up.  There also exist two cover songs as bonus tracks, both of which are great stuff.  This EP's orange and black inner artwork is some of the neatest I've seen.

Next is NIN's most successful and one of my favorite albums of all time, The Downward Spiral.  The album is a dark masterpiece, with each song sounding profound and being organized in the perfect way to give the album flow.  The lyrics tell a story of a protagonist descending his own personal downward spiral, starting with Mr Self Destruct and ending with Hurt at the bottom of the spiral.  This album also spawned Closer, the most successful single of NIN's.

After a long period which were Trent Reznors darkest days, eventually The Fragile appeared, an atmospheric double album that was met with some controversy because of it's initial inaccessibility to the listener.  The album is still somewhat infamous for dropping from no 1 on the billboards in the first week.  However, the album sold well over time and was met with good reviews, and remains a favorite among dedicated NIN fans, including myself.  Somewhat Damaged, The Wretched, We're In This Together, Even Deeper, La Mer, Into The Void, Where is Everybody?, StarFuckers Inc, and The Big Come Down are my favorite songs on the album.  It would be wonderful if double album epics like this and Pink Floyd's The Wall were more common, though sadly they are difficult to make and aren't the most marketable form of album.

After yet another long period in which Reznor became sober and reinvented himself and NIN, With Teeth showed up, with the intial title of Bleedthrough.  With Teeth is the era I was most familiar with of NIN when I first discovered them (or rather him).  The album has a stripped down raw sound compared to NIN's earlier albums, being less focused on being a sprawling epic like The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, and more on being a collection of songs that happen to fit together.  Some might say this is NIN's safest and most marketable album.  The first half could probably be described that way, though the tail end starting with The Line Begins to Blur becomes very experimental and much more daring.  While still having a dark tone, the album is a nice tribute to Reznor's rise from the ashes that he faced.

Soon after, an alternate reality game with the theme "art is resistance" showed up everywhere, foreshadowing the release of Year Zero.  Much more daring and dense than With Teeth, this album takes on a heavily political tone, Reznor focusing not so much on his own journey this time, but on what he believes is right.  He does this tactfully and creatively, with the lyrics painting a picture of a dystopian future of the United States following what Reznor saw as the unfortunate path it was heading down.  The album is very dancible as well as challenging but rewarding after several listens.  The Good Soldier, Vessel, Me I'm Not, Capital G, The Warning, God Given, Meet Your Master, In This Twilight, and Zero-Sum are my favorites.  I would put this in NIN's top 3 easily.

After this, Trent Reznor departed from Interscope Records and spent some time as an independent musician and working on several different projects.  The first was Ghosts I-IV, a completely instrumental double album (or rather a quadruple EP depending on how you look at it).  Overall I would say this is the weakest album by NIN, but only because it is missing lyrics and isn't quite as great of an experience as works that have Reznor's voice.  However, the instrumentals are great stuff, ranging from quiet introspective pieces, to high energy jams.  The thing I adore about this album is the packaging.  Each song has an associated piece of artwork.  On top of that, the physical release came in the form of several tiers, the Standard, Deluxe, and Ultra Deluxe Editions; with the Ultra Deluxe being perhaps one of the prettiest packages to hold an album.  Plus it was signed by Reznor himself, which is pretty sweet.  Sadly I did not get a hold of one of these things.

Finally, the last album in this review is The Slip, the final album that NIN put out while working independently of a record label.  The album's first half is hard hitting while the second half is instrumental and atmospheric, aside from the final song.  The album was completely free upon release, making it hard to call this a waste even if it were a bad album.  However it is nice, with my favorites being Discipline, Echoplex, Head Down, and Demon Seed.

Next up is the review of the newest album just released, Hesitation Marks!

Something New

I haven't made a post here in awhile.  I don't think anyone even reads this, but I feel like I should start writing again for personal fulfillment.  In my own life there hasn't been a whole lot going on that's interesting to read or write about.  I mostly like writing about abstract things that don't directly pertain to my life anyway.

The biggest thing jumping out to write about right now is the federal government shutdown.  On one hand though it almost seems too obvious to write about that.  I'm not sure how much new information I'd have to offer regarding it, but I guess I could muse on what I think caused it and what could be drawn from it.  It seems to be a mixture of stubbornness and too much blind adherence to an ideology.

I have not read the "Obamacare" health act, but I've heard bits and pieces of what it is made up of.  The more reliable sources don't seem to me to paint a picture of something that is something worth gambling a government shutdown over.  Also, either way it was voted on and enacted in accordance to the principles of democracy, and so it would seem to me that it's opponents ought to admit defeat and let us try it out.  But the blind adherence to the republican ideology does not let them be open minded enough to do that, so they have to play the game of trying to strike it down by any means necessary.  After 40 attempts to repeal it, they found it wouldn't work so they did a work around to defund it and it backfired horribly.  One could say the democrats in the senate are to blame for not passing the act, but in my opinion they did the right thing by not budging.  It seems apparent to me that the shutdown is on the backs of the republicans.

But it is what it is.  From what it sounds like, the consequences won't be as extreme as a government shutdown might suggest.  Eventually they will agree on a budget plan and resume business as usual.  But the idea of the end of the US government is kind of fun to think about, as it would be a very significant event, one that could potentially mean the end of the nation of the United States of America.  Part of me would welcome something like that, it would be interesting to follow and it would force people to become engaged, including me.  The US seems to be almost bored as a society.

To me, the whole thing as well as most of the events in politics lately have reflected the need to see things from outside of one's determined ideology.  The ability to see things from the other side.  I do not see this going on in American society as a whole, especially from conservatives.  I usually act moderately and say that both sides are in the wrong, but the close mindedness from the right in particular as of late seems to be significantly larger.  Some beliefs about Obama and Obamacare sound completely ridiculous and unfounded.
Anyhow, I'll end this post now.  Hopefully there will be more soon.