CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

this entry brought to you by space, "the female of the species"





It's been eighteen years since the release of Pretty Hate Machine, and with each subsequent Nine Inch Nails release, the theme of the album has been pretty predictable; while The Fragile was a more positive album in general than the others and With Teeth was a little more fun, in general Nine Inch Nails has been a vehicle of narcissism, delving into Trent Reznor's mind and digging up things about self dissatisfaction. There has never been anything wrong with that-- the blues as a genre has been since its inception about, well, being blue, and Reznor's music is essentially the blues set to textured guitars, industrial synths, and pounding beats. Still, if it's one thing you could criticize Nine Inch Nails for, its that every album tends to be about how depressed its mastermind is, much in the way a cynic could complain that all of Robert De Niro's movies tend to be about gangsters.

In a marked new direction for his creative output, Year Zero is Reznor's paranoid vision of an Orwellian future (albeit understandably paranoid, given today's state of affairs); a fascist police state under constant surveillance, civilians hopelessly addicted to drugs, a world of terrorists and religious zealots preaching about the end times. It's still Nine Inch Nails. He uses sprinkles many of his favorite images in the story, submission, marching, getting down on ones knees. But Reznor's tendency to look at things through dark lenses is now focused away from himself, and towards the world around him. From a story perspective there's very little that separates Year Zero from several dozen dystopian science fiction stories that have existed post 1984. What separates Reznor's fiction from others is that it involves the sky opening and God Himself-- or something like Him-- coming down and warning that the world will end if we don't clean up our acts. This wrinkle is fascinating and adds an interesting twist to the end of the story when the world does inevitably end: does man destroy itself in its never-ending war? Or does the entity from the sky coldly bring down mankind's destruction after we don't take its advice?

From a song-to-song perspective, despite Reznor's claim that the story is about a future, what's most interesting is how it all seems to be happening right now. Year Zero objective isn't so much the outlying story that his fascinating ARG (Alternate Reality Game-- check out its mind-bogglingly deep Wikipedia entry) details-- it's that there is only the loosest form of a narrative on the record. Every song seems to be about different characters living in this world, and while this is ostensibly Reznor's "political" album, politics almost seem to be a moot point. Reznor truly sympathizes with his characters, and while his lyrics are typically simple, their simplicity belies their depth-- you don't get in their head the way you would in, say, a Tori Amos song, but the breathy passion with which Reznor sings the songs adds surprising layers. In one song, "The Good Soldier", Reznor sings about a soldier fighting an endless war, telling himself God must be on his side. In two separate songs, "My Violent Heart" and "The Great Destroyer", he takes the terrorists point of view, in the first about Muslims watching their land being invaded by Americans, vowing unending vengeance, and in the latter Reznor imagines a Timothy McVeigh like character, paranoid and hoping that no one stops him before he fulfills his destiny. Neither of these two characters are wretched, evil things-- they are instead given as much sympathy as nearly every other character in the story; clearly giving as much thought to why the people caught in the middle of the clash do what they do. Elsewhere, Reznor imagines two drug addicts ("The Vessel", "Me, I'm Not"), and while the fiction established outside of the album itself explains these helpless souls as victims of the government's attempts to control the masses through its own drug supply, on the album it's not hard to see Reznor himself in these songs, having only a few years ago himself become sober from drug abuse. Reznor even allows an unusual amount of humor for Year Zero despite its grim premise-- "Capital G" is a grinning, tongue-in-cheek confession of a modern-day Neo Con who "used to stand for something", but now blindly follows a leader who signs his name with a capital G-- he might as well say his middle initial is Dubya. "The Warning" is a song about the aforementioned presence coming from the sky and telling the planet either shape up or ship out, which is immediately followed by "God Given", a winking tribute to the hypocrisy of evangelicals who take God's warning and get the message as wrong as they can.

Musically, Year Zero is much more subdued than the last two albums and is a return to computer generated noise rather than the live feel of With Teeth or the organic studio lushness of The Fragile; this time it's much more glitchy and feels as if its constantly coming apart. There is an element of Year Zero's tunes that feel random and unintentional, even though every blurb of static and every squelch was anything but. The songs are still put together in traditional ways, with verses, choruses, and Reznor's signature driving, grinding guitar licks (check out "Meet Your Master", "My Violent Heart" and "The Great Destroyer") , but the percussion here is much more erratic. There are some traditional drums here ( "Hyperpower!", "The Beginning of the End", "In This Twilight"), and in both the spare, mysterious "The Greater Good" and the tom-tom heavy "The Good Soldier" there is a trip-hoppy beat, but for the most part what passes as drums are belching, scratching bursts of noise (particularly "The Vessel", "The Warning" "God Given"). Year Zero is a markedly distinctive effort from the sounds of any of the previous Nine Inch Nails efforts, and what's more is that it sounds completely distinctive from everything else on the market. When you hear the droning, marching "Survivalism" or "Capital G" on the radio, it sounds completely different than anything that precedes or follows it. It's extremely re-assuring knowing that even 18 years doing this, Reznor is still trying new things and hasn't gotten comfortable in what he thinks Nine Inch Nails should sound like.

Trent Reznor has always had a really good ear for closing out his albums, and always save his most stark, poetic songs for the end: The Downward Spiral ended with its title track and "Hurt", one song about the peace after suicide, the other about contemplating suicide. With Teeth ended with "Right Where it Belongs", a song about pulling back the veil and seeing the world as a different place than you knew. Year Zero ends with the end of the world, which is in itself not a surprise because the album begins with "The Beginning of the End", so it only makes sense to end with, well, the end. The two songs, "In This Twilight" and "Zero-Sum" both find two couples watching the sky open up and fill with light, and thinking about their time on earth as stomping drums pound through the former and the hiccupping percussion clatters through the latter, and they are positively the most heart-wrenching songs Reznor has ever written, simultaneously bleak but almost profound in how unexpectedly moving they are. Reznor's take on Orwell's 1984 isn't necessarily the most original imagining of the end of the world, even with the albeit interesting addition of "The Warning", but it doesn't need to be. Year Zero is a sublime record that succeeds well at what Reznor set out to do-- examine the frightening, almost chaotic world around us, try to sympathize with it as much as possible, and imagine its foregone conclusion. It's a tale that's been told before, but its a tale that, in this day and age, bears repeating.
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yesterday day last year THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS! THANKSGIVING! PS3! LOST! on last year's POLARITY!

on this day last year you probably haven't thought about it, but if you had more money, you might be able to experience new food pleasures.
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with love from CRS @ 6:59 AM 

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