Nine Inch Nails: 2007’s Album of the YEAR ZERO
January 8th, 2008
Beyond any shadow of a doubt, Nine Inch Nails’ re-breakthrough album Year Zero was my favorite album of 2007. Rather than write an all new appreciation of the album, I am reprinting here my review of Year Zero as it originally appeared earlier this year on my now-defunct music blog, The Spacing Guild Guide to Good Music. Enjoy! If for some reason you don’t own this album yet, click on the above link immediately before the Administration (or the RIAA) makes it illegal for American citizens to enjoy music of this caliber. If you need convincing however, read on:
Nine Inch Nails and I…we have a seriously bipolar love/hate relationship that goes waaaaaaayyyy back. I remember hearing Pretty Hate Machine for the first time when I was a senior in highschool and just loathing that album. What a hideous mishmash of groovy synthpop and crunchy industrial! You don’t take two genres like that and…and…and smoosh them together! Right?! That’s like drinking orange juice after you brush your teeth! But, given time, I began to realize that Human League-ish synthpop and Ministry-ish guitar industrial could function together, each element twining around the other like the snakes climbing the caduceus. Not only could they function together, but their strengths combined to produce a form of music even more potent than its separate constituents could ever hope to be alone. I not only grew to love the album after I while, I came to regard it as one of THE finest albums ever recorded: a syncretic masterpiece that truly broke new ground musically.
Broken was a good little followup EP…even though it made me wonder, "Why is Trent Reznor trying to be all metal now?" By the time The Downward Spiral came out, though, I’d outgrown my late-teenage/college-freshman wangst and had begun to find Reznor’s one-track "Oh, woe is me, now please fuck me anyway" lyrics to be obnoxiously juvenile: the kind of crap the black-clad quiet kids in my poetry classes used to write in notebooks decorated with pictures of skulls and bleeding hearts. At least Reznor’s music was still okay….Or so I thought then. Today, having acquired the deluxe, remastered "anniversary" edition of The Downward Spiral and having listened to it in its entirety for the first time since…oh, 1997, I’ve come to see that album as little more than a constellation of blatant musical and lyrical cliches so relentless average it’s just not worth listening to. The brilliant poppy industrial of Pretty Hate Machine had been swallowed entirely by ludicrous cock-rock guitars, stupid fantasies about suicide, and (ugh) that relentlessly awful "I want to fuck you like an animal" line….
Don’t even get me started on The Fragile. It’s the only NIN album I do not own, and will never own. It’s so awful, I won’t even talk about why I hate it.
Nine Inch Nails’ "comeback" album, With Teeth, was decent…but far too homogenous. For the most part, every song on the album save for the big singles, "The Hand That Feeds" and "Only," sounds exactly like every other song on the album. I tired of it in little more than a week. Especially because the lyrics, again, sounded like something found on a suicidal 14-year-old’s LiveJournal.
When I first heard that Reznor was putting out another album this year, my first thought was: "Eh." Reznor gots skillz: he really can put together a catchy, memorable jam when he sets his mind to it (witness "The Perfect Drug" with its amazing combination of malevolent synths and psychotic drum solo)–but after more than a decade of overexposure and the same ol’ petulant self-hatred, NIN’s schtick had completely worn thin for me. When I soon discovered that the album was going to be–oh, joy–a concept album, I shuddered to think that the world was going to be forced to endure yet another onanic ego-fest like The Fragile.
And then came the first "leaked" track, "My Violent Heart." And the barrage of mysterious websites detailing a terrifying police-state future presided over by a totalitarian Christian fascist regime, a future in which the water has been doped with sedatives and a vast four-fingered hand is reaching down from the skies to impart warnings of a great and terrible change. The viral marketing campaign, with its bottomless layers of puzzles, backstory, and eerie art, was nothing short of brilliant–and hinted that this new album was going to be unlike anything heretofore attempted by Reznor and friends. But would the music live up to the hype surrounding it? "My Violent Heart" sure as hell did. In fact, it went beyond the hype. I found myself playing it over, and over, and over, and over again. I listened to it under headphones so I could appreciate the gritty, mutilated sonic textures and better hear the ominous revolutionary lyrics:
you have set something in motion
much greater than you’ve ever known
standing there in all your grand naivety
about to reap what you have sown
time will feed upon your weaknesses
and soon you’ll lose the will to care
when you return to the place that you call home
we will be there we will be there
Wwwwwwwwwait a sec. This is from the guy’s whose greatest lyrical claims to fame so far have been "Head like a hole / black as your soul" and "I wanna fuck you like an animal"?!
Needless to say, as more and more tracks were "leaked" on USB drives left in various places at NIN concerts around the world–"Survivalism" then "Me, I’m Not", and finally "In This Twilight"–and more and more websites detailing the bleak, brutal world of "Year Zero" (approximately 2022) came to light, my anticipation caught fire. I loved the songs I was hearing. There was plenty of hype surrounding the album, yes, but song by song, I was becoming more and more impressed by the music–and, after all, that’s what matters the most.
The album is now out, and I’m here to report to you that Trent Reznor has done the damnear impossible: 1) he has topped Pretty Hate Machine; and 2) he has matured both lyrically and musically. This is, simply put, an incredible album.
It’s difficult to separate the music from the web-presence surrounding the music. In many ways, the lyrics just won’t make much sense unless you’ve read about The Presence, Opal, the Administration, the Church of Plano, "Angry Shooter," and the rest…but this review is not going to deal with any of that. Ultimately, any album has to be able to stand on its own feet as a unique musical achievement. So, let’s take a look at just the music itself on its own terms. What hath Reznor wrought here?
First off: this is a sonically-challenging album–and yet, it’s still quite listenable and accessible. Do not expect the clean, sparkly synthpop of Pretty Hate Machine, the industrial metal of Broken and much of The Downward Spiral, or the fuzzy-bassed rock of With Teeth here, folks: this is a seriously "industrial" album…in that it’s assembled mostly from harsh, distorted, mechanical sounds and rhythms that fall upon the ear like an avalanche of rusted slag in an abandoned machineshop. The beats are hard and crunchy, mechanical and glitchy: rather similar to the rhythms heard on Skinny Puppy’s triumphant Mythmaker, in fact. The basslines are murky and heavily-processed, as are the synths and the geetars…which are so processed, they barely sound like guitars. The music is sharp-edged and brittle, flat-out vicious at times (as one would expect from any NIN album, no matter how diverse his output can be), and yet surprisingly melodic. Most of the songs have catchy choruses ("My Violent Heart" and "God Given") or stirring guitar/synth solos (the coda to "The Good Soldier" and all of "The Warning")–they stick in your head like shrapnel, and you’ll definitely find yourself humming along to them as they shriek out of your speakers.
But what really makes this album are the lyrics. Yep. You heard me. The lyrics, people. The words comin’ outta Trent Reznor’s mouth.
"Hold up, Pegritz," you say. "Didn’t you just say that Trent’s lyrics are, ahem, ‘obnoxiously juvenile’?" Damn right, I did. But do note that the lyrics from "My Violent Heart" quoted above were surprisingly thoughtful, mature, and downright meaningful in their poetic discussion of responsibility. No 14-year-old-goth-girl-oh-I-hate-myself-and-wish-I-were-dead blather here! With Year Zero, Trent Reznor has finally come of age…and he’s proven that he actually has something to say.
Year Zero is ultimately a collection of vignettes, with each song being told from the various perspectives of different voices speaking from the totalitarian future America which is developed more thoroughly in the webwork of "secret" websites that complement the album. In "Survivalism" we’ve got the words of the "Angry Shooter" declaring his one-man war against the Regime (a very thinly-disguised Bush Regime). "The Good Soldier" relates a young conscript’s growing crisis of conscience, and could easily be spoken by many a soldier today posted in Iraq. "The Warning" recounts a sighting and revelation by "The Presence", which is apparently an alien contact scenario in which humanity is warned that its days are numbered unless it cleans up its act. "Zero Sum," the album closer, describes the end prophesied in "The Warning" not with horror but with a terribly sad resignation. We tried…half-heartedly. But we failed just as we always knew we would.
If you want to see how far Trent Reznor has come as a lyricist, compare the chorus of "Zero Sum" with all the lyrics of "Big Man with a Big Gun":
shame on us
doomed from the start
may god have mercy
on our dirty little hearts
shame on us
for all we’ve done
and all we ever were
just zeros and ones. ("Zero Sum")
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
maybe I’ll put a hole in your head
you know, just for the fuck of it
I can reduce you if I want
I can devour
I’m hard as fucking steel, and I’ve got the power
I’m every inch a man, and I’ll show you somehow
me and my fucking gun
nothing can stop me now
shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot
I’m going to come all over you
me and my fucking gun
me and my fucking gun. ("Big Man with a Big Gun.")
Uuuuuuuh-huh….Can you possibly get more puerile than the latter’s tired, worn-out "wang as weapon" metaphor? That shit had been done to death by the end of the year-long Punk Era. In light of that, I honestly find it difficult to believe that the same voice responsible for that pathetic spurt of overtaxed machismo dressed up in cheap death-metal grinding also wrote the disturbing words, "I can swallow it down / keep it all inside / I define myself / by how well I hide" ("Me, I’m Not").
In turning his lyrical focus away from the wanky self-hatred and romantic disappointment that drove so much of his other work toward an uncompromising sociopolitical message that attempts far more than mere introspection, Reznor has finally found a thoroughly adult and undeniably potent attitude that gives his latest album a force never before seen in his work. If anything ensures his presence in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it will be Year Zero.
Which is not to say that this is a perfect album. Far from it. Perfect albums are rare than radium, after all. Many of the songs on Year Zero follow the exact same structural formula of "intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-instrumental coda." Many of the songs follow the exact same "whispered verse, shouted chorus" followed by glitchy guitar/synth solo pattern. The beats show little variation over the course of any individual song, and many are obviously loops. All this makes the album start to sound a little repetitive by, say, the ninth or tenth track. And the album’s one ambient piano piece, "Another Version of the Truth," is completely misplaced, coming toward the very end of the album and shortcircuiting its otherwise seamless build-up.
Nonetheless, these flaws are not extremely pronounced and can be easily overlooked, overshadowed as they are by all that’s so right about the album.
In short: Wow. Year Zero is finally showing NIN’s talent for all that it is. It’s an album of raw power and disturbingly contemporary vision. If you can listen to Year Zero and NOT find yourself wanting to overthrow the current American government by any means necessary, then you are obviously drinking too much of the water.
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