C/D--Nine Inch Nails

I agree that Fixed was better than Broken but I large chunks of The Fragile were fantastic. Maybe I'm just very easy to entertain but "The Wretched", "The Fragile", "We're In This Together Now" and "Into The Void" rank up there among my favorite Trent songs.

Pretty Hate Machine is still amazingly innovative, even if its sound is dated at this point.

:::splutter:::;

WHAT? Ministry and Skinny Puppy might vociferously dispute that.

On the topic of NIN, I like them okay. I keep trying to like The Fragile, and sometimes I succeed. The thing is, I really like songs on Disc Two like "Where Is Everybody" and "Into The Void," so I listen to those a fair amount even today. But when I try to play Disc One all the way through, I get hung up almost instantly, because the rhyme "There is a place that still remains/It eats the fear, it eats the pain" just perfectly encapsulates everything that's wrong with Trent Reznor the lyricist. The first time I listened to the CD, I heard the first line of that couplet and thought "Oh, shit, he's going to rhyme 'remains' with 'pain,' isn't he?" And sure enough, he did, and I have hated that song ever since.

Let's try that again.

I would say Trent filtered pop songs through the sound of vintage Skinny Puppy, blah blah blah...

xpost - referring to it as "innovative" was me being a little sarcastic!

Obviously it's his intensity more than anything that gets to people.

You know, that could be. My head's nowhere near at the same place it was when I listened to Downward Spiral day in day out, thank goodness. In the interim between that and The Fragile I went and discovered postmodern irony disease and now I can't seem to un-discover it, so I just can't relate to the stuff in the same way - although I still have a lot of empathy & fondness for Reznor and would totally invite him over for a cup of tea. I think my trouble with NIN is that Reznor seems to think good art is always honest, and to equate 100% honesty with a fairly limited scope of feelings and emotions, 99% of which are negative.. But you can be honest and be goofy and funny, and anyway, good art is not necessarily created in a really loud confessional. Maybe I sound like Captain Obvious saying that but it wasn't at all obvious to me when I first got into NIN.

I think Trent should ditch the whole industrial alternagoth shtick altogether and just write pop music, which is clearly his calling.

Isn't the goth shtick on the way out, though? Perhaps there should be a restraining order taken out against all goths in the vicinity of T-Rez so the rest of us could have some nice pop tunes.

It's one of my favourites this year. I don't understand the hate it got.

I like that! I'm into chanted mantras or something.

WITH-A TEETH-A!

Y'know, like Mark E. Smith.

Title track was my favorite thing on there for a long while.

I think there are elements of humor in his later work too Jess (at least Broken and The Downward Spiral - I haven't actually followed Trent beyond that). I think his hardest and loudest tracks are often also the funniest (intentionally).

...Or, at least, I have to assume that there is something kinda self-knowing about lyrics like:

"Big time, hard luck/bad luck, FIST FUCK!/Don't think you're having all the fun/you know me, I HATE EVERYONE!"

or

"Shove it up INSIDE! SURPRISE! LIES!"

fragile is a fucking dope album

Reznor can definitely be guilty at times of overusing the same tricks, but that wasn't the problem on the Fragile for me! If anything the problem was that he awkwardly tacked on those 'predictable' pop song structures to songs that didnt work in that way. The best tracks on the Fragile by far are the instrumentals, and it would have been great if he had released an entirely (or almost entirely instrumental) album.

Overall, I still like the Fragile a lot despite its flaws.

-- latebloomer: AKA Sir Teddy Ruxpin, Former Scientologist (latebloomer), Sunday, March 27, 2005 9:20 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

this post features a great summation sentence, its like a book report

OTM ^

The THX-1138 sample that Downward Spiral leads off with is classic in itself.

http://www.nin.com/strobelight/

Nine Inch Nails - Classic or Dud Funny Or Not?

Right, I'm going to listen to that whole thing next time I'm alone in the house for an hour.

Trent is somewhat of a confused popist I think

Really? :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJYBx5NJULY

New song: http://www.stereogum.com/1917494/nine-inch-nails-burning-bright-field-on-fire/music/?utm_source=sc-fb&utm_medium=ref&utm_campaign

Kind of cool as a noisy sludge-rock guitar jam, even if there's not that much of a song there.

it's literally a dandy warhols cover :D

Year Zero has been very satisfying to listen to this past week.

This EP is great! Been a while since I was pretty amped from a new NIN release.