Nine Inch Nails turns down guitar amp, tears down ‘wall of sound’ for revitalized, EBM/Hip-hop sound on latest album
In 2009, Nine Inch Nails waved goodbye to their fans on their final tour. Trent Reznor, frontman and creative mastermind behind the project, retired the band early so that he could focus on other creative endeavors. Since then, he’s scored two films, won an Oscar for one, and started “How to Destroy Angels,” a new band with his wife. He’s also had two sons.
Yes, the same guy who screamed obscenities at a generation of trench coat wearers became a proud father. And yes, he won an Academy Award. He beat Hans Zimmer for that one.
It’s been a surreal last few years for fans of his music, and now, with the surprise rebirth of Nine Inch Nails (NIN), times have become even crazier. NIN had served its purpose, but clearly Reznor’s career kept on without it.
But we were wrong. As evidenced by its winking album title, “Hesitation Marks,” Reznor just couldn’t go through with killing off his claim to fame.
“Hesitation Marks” opens with ominous yet brief soundscape of blips, screeches and moaning. Soon after, arpeggiated synths usher in “Copy of A,” on which we find Reznor wrestling with his desire to not repeat himself.
Then the album swiftly follows through with “Came Back Haunted,” its first single. Paying homage to the Nine Inch Nails of the early 90s, this track is a bombastic combination of heavy drum machines, a low bass groove and lyrics which examine Reznor’s hiatus from the band. Midway through the track, a stabbing guitar riff roars through the noise. Listeners who pay close attention will recognize it as a rearrangement of “The Downward Spiral” motif, only where that original melody sounded depressed and defeated, this one sounds triumphant.
It’s an interesting bit of commentary on who Reznor was 20 years ago, and who he is now.
And after this bout of retrospection is where the album takes a turning point. Reznor stops struggling against and reconciling with his past, pushing forward into the future. “All Time Low,” with its funky guitar line and brilliant up-and-down pattern of interlocking synthesizers, ushers in the new Nine Inch Nails. Less guitar thrashing, more beat-driven, it takes a hard left away from electro-rock and into EBM/hip-hop inspired territory.
“Disappointed” utilizes House-style claps and snaps in conjunction with a glitched-up, Radiohead-like rhythm. “Satellite” is about the paranoia of the information age (made all the more timely by the Snowden debacle), set to the most dance-able beat on the album.
The downside is that all this leaves “Everything,” a pop-rock, guitar-driven, overly friendly track breaking apart the otherwise coherent flow of the album.
On “Hesitation Marks,” Reznor has backed away from his overwhelming “wall of sound” technique, in which he layers noise and instrumentation together until the individual elements become a singular entity. There is an emphasis here on giving each element room to breathe, as well as only including what pieces are totally necessary. This doesn’t make “Hesitation Marks” a less complex work. Rather, it’s a subtle record, one which rewards repeat listens with the intricacies of its rhythms and noise.
For fans, this new direction might take some getting used to, but for Reznor, it’s a brilliant demonstration of his vast musical range.
He didn’t just bring Nine Inch Nails back from the dead to watch it stumble around like a zombie, attempting to recreate its own past. He’s reinvigorated it, with energy and a new sense of creative purpose.
In one of the final, most heartfelt tracks, Reznor whispers “A little more every day/Falls apart and slips away/I don’t mind, I’m okay/Nothing ever stays the same.” It’s an honest, unflinching look by Reznor at his own mortality, a far cry from the man who used to pour his wounded soul into a microphone on “Hurt.”
And that’s what makes the changes in sound all make perfect sense. NIN was always a singular creative snapshot of Reznor’s life as it was during recording. He may have been a pit of unyielding rage, a depressed heroin addict, a rehabilitated junkie or an experimental indie in the digital age, but he “survived everything,” and what we have now is an artist at the height of his creativity and personal happiness, who is moving on, with or without any of you “pigs.”