The day the POLL went away: NIN's The Fragile

Alright I'm finally gonna listen to it. On less than top-notch headphones.

xpost -- It's like they wrote the thoughts in your head (including hating "Starfuckers")

This album is mostly awesome, so much so that it barely needs anyone to come to its defense.

Huh, that piece missed noted Reznor's descent into drugs. When next we saw our hero, he was clean, sober and Hulk-huge.

It's like they wrote the thoughts in your head (including hating "Starfuckers")

haha basically

"this works best as a contiguous piece" - check
"by the time this was released, it was out of fashion" - check
"'Starfuckers Inc' is super dumb" - check

xp: he was also back to distilling his angst into digestible 4 minute nuggets as opposed to thematically-linked double albums, which I think plays a lot into NIN's modern rock resurgence

My 39-minute edit, contiguous with SPIN magazine thread:

Just Like You Imagined
The Day The World Went Away
The Wretched
We're In This Together
Even Deeper
Please
The Big Come Down
La Mer

I made a 10 track edit I'm quite pleased with a while ago (cheating slightly with track 2):

La Mer
The Day the World Went Away (Still)
We're in this Together
The Fragile
Just Like You Imagined
Even Deeper
Into the Void
I'm Looking Forward to Joining You
The Big Come Down
The Great Below

you can't have La Mer AND Into The Void

pfft, maybe you can

There's a lot of room between them!

I remember Stylus doing a single-disc edit but really 10 tracks or fewer if you're taking it seriously

Obviously I like your one because you've chosen most of the tracks I've chosen

Thanks, yours is cool too - though I'm not that big on Please.

The main trouble with listening to an edit is some of the opening segues sound really jarring in isolation.

Please is in only because I needed to flesh out the relative perfection of the other 7 tracks and because of the chord-change into the chorus

Definitely some of his prettiest moments on this album; the Frail and the coda of We're in This Together are just lush.

he did "the big come down" at the show i saw the other night, was not expecting my favorite fragile deep cut in a nin setlist in 2013

wow chap's 10 track reduction is probably perfect

Cheers!

to make it twelve tracks i'd probably drop in "the mark has been made" and "underneath it all"

Yeah good choices. I'm a little sad to lose The Frail/The Wretched as well.

there's no way I could cut The frail/The wretched

lj how would you assess the lyrics of this album

balladic

more in terms of value judgments than structure

there are some beautiful moments on this album in terms of SONICS
i am going to get high drink some burgundy and play it loud one of these days

the big come down = don't give this track that title

the lyrics on this album work surprisingly well for the puerile sloganeering that they are

directness of lyric to match directness of the music perhaps although the latter has more subtlety

see with the downward spiral i would use that same argument but that album had a reassuring kind of acrid, devitalized sort of feel that kept it in the lineage of various industrial predecessors but the fragile is much more refined and 'full' sort of sound probably courtesy of whatever state of the art late 90s digital production

i revisited this album for the first time in ages recently. and even now, i'm no closer to remembering anything but "We're In This Together" in any particular detail.

Even Deeper has that direct chorus, but it also has some jazzy touches unthinkable in The Downward Spiral. I guess the lyrics, while still direct, are less confrontational, more reflective this time out.

Apart from that shitty Starfuckers song

there's no way I could cut The frail/The wretched

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, 18 October 2013 03:52 (Yesterday) Permalink

if it had been released on either a pre-/post- Fragile EP with maybe some of these castoffs [excluding starfuckers], i don't see why not.

lawl i was trying to get you to riff on starfuckers inc

still has some nice chunky rock sounds

I like the 'You're So Vain' middle eight in Starfuckers.

the single version of starfuckers ends with a live Kiss sample which totally makes the song IMO

or rather the version included on the "day the world went away" single

This... might be my favorite NIN album? At least (Left) is a strong contender; we'll see how I feel once I get to (Right)

"We're In This Together" is almost definitely my favorite NIN single at this point.

I like this album a hell of a lot and whenever I've listened to it always felt that there's a whole bunch of underrated work on here. Pretty Hate Machine is pretty much my go-to Nine Inch Nails album at this point, and I still enjoy the hell out of The Downward Spiral even though I've listened to it so much that I don't think there's anything left to discover about it (that, and it seems to be one of those records that are best listened to when you're of a certain age) but the highlights on The Fragile are easily as good as anything Trent ever did.

weirdly, Pilgrimage is the track i enjoy hearing the most of this these days.

There are 3-4 songs I really like but honestly if I'm gonna listen to NIN now it's gonna be either The Slip or Hesitation Marks.

our Hesitation Marks, I hope

well full disclosure, the album I actually LISTEN to the most is Year Zero Remixed

I haven't really listened to Hesitation Marks since it first came out.

this is really my favorite nin album. a 9-track edit of hesitation marks would also be a contender

i was v disappointed by every successive nin album bc i really just want him to build on his instrumental work on this record. ghosts was v inadequate as that goes

I should also relisten to With Teeth sometime

'Right Where It Belongs' probably one of my favourite Nine Inch Nails tracks, when all's said and done.

last two tracks on with teeth are incredible

rest of it ehh

suggest ban

the score for that movie slaps, though

I enjoy the moody bits too, and never bother with making my own edits of albums anyway, but the thing that always strikes me about The Fragile when I listen to it is how you could construct a tight album from its pop moments that sounds more like Pretty Hate Machine 2 than anything else Trent ever actually did.

Think I noted on a different thread that Leopold Ross, who used to collaborate more with his brother, did the score to that Godzilla TV show (among other things), and it sounded so much like Atticus and Trent that 1) it verged on parody and 2) it kind of made me wonder what Trent brought to his scores with Atticus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KI6S_Eq7pU

huh, I somehow had no idea that was Atticus's brother. I guess my deep NIN fandom dropped off at some point in the last, uh, 25 years

i'll probably try to get a poll up and running in the next week or two

:D

i'm going to open the poll later but first, any thoughts on side-polls beyond songs/albums? do people want to poll the reznor/ross soundtrack stuff too or remixes as side polls? i will probably just accept htda material as eligible for the main polls

remixes wd probably be good? - i think scores & soundtrack stuff is a bit much

sidepoll: trent hairdos
jk

The scores/soundtracks might be 2-3 separate polls alone!

yeah its a pretty hefty list