  Nine Inch Nails
The Fragile
Nothing/ Interscope
CD Review
by Reef Valmont
Halo 14
Everything is
different now. Everything has irreversibly
changed in countless miniscule ways. Every time
Trent Reznor releases a record, new impossible
colors appear in the palette of rock music. The
importance of a new Nine Inch Nails album can be
overwrought, even overlooked by the ignorant and
jealous, but it cannot be overstated. After five
years of most rock music sitting in it's own piss
begging for some last moments of attention and
pity, a new Nine Inch Nails album is practically
the second coming of Christ. No-one cares about
music like Reznor cares. No-one cares about a
musician like Reznor's fans care about him. This
is a serious business, for sure, but more
importantly, it's a glorious, magnificent,
life-affirming, soul-scorching, wings-giving
head-cleaning statement of art and ambition. Pull
up a prayer cushion and get on your knees, your
patience and faith now has reason to breathe and
live, it's called The Fragile
and you need it more than you could ever know.
Half A
Decade
Five fucking
years, five long, long fucking years. I don't
want to hear another Limp Bizkit or Sugar Ray or
Days Of The New or Orgy pretending that they're a
band for the rest of time. I don't want to hear Marilyn Manson's self-serving messiah
masturbation manifesto anymore. I don't want to
see Michael Stipe's deliberately weirdo
pretend-reluctant rock star pantomime on any
stage or TV screen. I don't want to pay 25 bucks
to catch a husked and drained
once-upon-a-rock-band going through the motions
at The Fenix or The Firehouse. I don't want to
get another album with one great song and nine
copyist pieces of didn't-even-try lackluster
bollocks. I don't want some jackass who shakes
his head on stage and does a coupla lines off of
an ugly woman's stomach before the show
proclaiming himself an icon in Raygun.
Fuck you, Korn. Fuck you, Creed. Fuck off all of
you posing, inefficient, visionless pieces of
shit hanging inside Rolling Stone in
your shiny red shirts and street-street combat
boots. Fuck you, Oasis. Fuck off all you
heart-string drawing folky acoustic balladeers of
the simplest, easiest, bluelined human emotions.
Fuck you if you take it easy and flow like water
through the simplest channel. Fuck you if you
really don't give a shit. Fuck you if you pander.
Package
Me
The Fragile'
is over 100 minutes and 20 songs long and comes
on 2 tapes, 2 CD's or 3 pieces of vinyl. Each
format has a different number of 'side/movement'
beginnings and endings, and thus each format has
a different sequention of music. The vinyl,
having the most sides, includes 2 extra tracks,
completists, and is probably the most effective
sequention of the bunch, perfectionists. Are you
tasting the attention to the tiniest detail? The
beautiful cover art features the world-famous
boxed NIN logo cut right in half horizontally.
Draw your own statement of intent from that.
There's a lyric booklet, also beautifully
illustrated, telling the story of Reznor's 5 year
exile in psychotherapy, desperation, panic,
betrayal, loss, mourning and eventually calm.
He's no longer pretending to reach for the gun,
no more Downward Spiral with only
blackness waiting, there's actually squares of
light in the dirt.
Team NIN
As always, Nine
Inch Nails is Trent Reznor. As always, Reznor
lists the members of the live NIN team on the
sleeve for the upcoming word tour that kicks off
in Europe in December. As always, there are aides
and accomplices in the NIN recording process. The
Fragile was engineered and co-produced by
the mighty Alan Moulder, the man who worked his
magic in the past with My Bloody Valentine, Curve
and many other envelope-pushing bands. The
Fragile was sequenced by Bob Ezrin, producer
of Pink Floyd's The Wall. As
you read this, The Fragile is the #1
selling record in America, and, believe it or
not, the first time NIN have climbed to the top
of the commercial pile.
The
Fragile
The most
important album of the year pushes itself into
the national anger capillary with 'Somewhat
Damaged,' a thudding and pounding piece of
ominous tension seething with threat and
impending violence. Loud, louder, loudest.
"This machine is obsolete" screams
Reznor, and the new era of NIN has begun. 'The
Day The World Went Away' gently peels back the
skin of fucked-up-ness kinda like 'Hurt' did on The
Downward Spiral, and then it's into the
first of the instrumentals on the album, this one
called 'The Frail.' Some bands use instrumentals
as fillers, experiments, pointless segues. Nine
Inch Nails use them as mood setters, jumping
points between emotive tableaus on the record,
transitions with purpose and destiny. Note the
detail, the way every nanosecond on this album is
architectured to perfection, no-one even comes
close to NIN in that department. Reznor's
attention to detail, density and substance is
awe-inspiring.
More hate. 'The
Wretched' weaves piano, guitar and electronic
mojo into a huge, punching FUCK YOU song with the
bitter chorus 'It didn't turn out the way you
wanted it to, did it, did it' repeated over and
over as the guitars launch missiles into a
burning red sky. Big, bad and brutal, I know
someone I'd love to play this one to at full
blast with their ears nail-gunned to their skull.
Sometimes the best revenge is watching your enemy
fuck themselves up through their own misguided
actions, and 'The Wretched' knows this.
Behold title
track The Fragile, one of the most
desolately beautiful works Reznor has ever
written. Where 'Head Like A Hole' found Reznor
wanting to die before succumbing to his lover's
dominance, and 1994's 'Reptile' had him comparing
his amor to a cum-sucking honey-trailing whore, The
Fragile is a genuine attempt at a love song,
Reznor quietly singing "I won't let you fall
apart" to his shining woman who
"matters where everything is
meaningless." Of course, this is Nine Inch
Nails, so by the end of the song the world has
intruded and ugliness permeates the anguished
beauty of the track's beginnings.
'Into The Void'
smacks of The Downward Spiral with it's
string and beats build-up, but thirty seconds in
and Reznor's dressed up like Prince, big fat
'Feel You Up' synth chords squelching out around
him. Looped metal guitar swirls in, the vocal
tracks start overlapping, the volume rises, and
just when you expect that cavalcade of NIN noise,
it's more synths and beeps and 'Horny Toad'
fuck-rhythms. Surprises are around every corner
on The Fragile, and there's a lot of
corners.
'Starfuckers,
Inc.' is a massively calculated slam of Reznor's
one-time protégé and friend, Marilyn Manson.
Lyrics like 'My God pouts on the cover of a
magazine/my God's a shallow little bitch trying
to make the scene''leave little room for doubt.
Not only does Reznor nail a man he feels betrayed
him, he also creates one of the best and hardest
rock tracks of the year leaving his pretenders in
the dust. Just to elevate 'Starfuckers' to that
perfect NIN level of innovative structuring,
Reznor climaxes the song by softly interjecting
the coup-de-grace from Carly Simon's 'You're So
Vain' and then giving it Certified Devil Strength
with murderous howls, apocalyptic six-string
ninja assaults and rugby-team backing vocals.
Awesome.
Atari Teenage
Riot and Prodigy are in the funeral parlor on
'Complication,' a full-speed zig-zag tech assault
laid smack down on a whining pseudo-goth acoustic
guitar channel. It's short, it's lyricless, it
will kick your ass.
'I'm Looking
Forward To Joining You, Finally' is the most
bizarre song title on a NIN record this far,
sounding way more Morrissey than Reznor, another
indication of the man's attitude change.
Musically, we're in swamp-delta-funk territory,
Tom Waits throwing his shadow across the
soundboard. Apparently Reznor set himself musical
targets in the studio, taping names and album
titles to the mixing desk as inspiration for vibe
and feel. This song was definitely recorded under
the 'Bone Machine' banner. "I've done all I
can do/could I please come with you?"
whispers Reznor as the album reaches it's final
movement.
'The Big Come
Down' harks back to original pre-'Pretty Hate
Machine' NIN, all new-wave keyboard and
hyperactive adrenalized Madonna-esque structure,
albeit with shouting vocals and not sultry
whispers. 'Underneath It All' as the
self-referential title suggests is trademark
Nails. Massive breakbeats meet slow and low
vocals meet rising clanging guitars. Faster,
louder, harder, more. "All I do," sings
Reznor, "I can still feel you."
It all gets
buried beneath the waves when 'Ripe (With Decay)'
ends The Fragile via slow, long, sullen
and schizophrenic instrumental drowning. The
silence that follows is deafening, yet strangely
peaceful. You need this record, and if you ignore
it, you lose, big time.
Email Reef Valmont
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