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[pentaen]

aw man you gotta do an unboxing of it, like slowly....i am enjoying this too much....

[Thrillho]

Put your cock away, man.

[Lines]

I downloaded the free part and I enjoyed it very much. I think I'll get the rest of it after spring break is over and I have money again.

[amok]

this is good background music but if I actually try and listen to the whole thing it all kinda blurs into one trent's-studio-jam-session and my mind switches off around the middle of the third disc. god only knows where one track ends and the next begins.

not slating it, it's obviously good for what it is, but it's just not interesting or cohesive enough to hold my attention.

[KvP]

I noticed that too. They sort of bleed together. But it's for the best, I suppose. It's been awhile since I could put on something that I listen to end-to-end instead of searching for the best cuts and discarding the rest. Most of the songs are vessels for a single musical idea, and they're short enough that they don't outstay their welcome.

Tinymixtapes had a pretty good review of the album (although 75% or so was retelling history) which is surprising, since their review of With Teeth was an image of the Windows prompt for deletion of the album (not that they were wrong, it wasn't the strongest effort)

[morca007]

I got the free part, first impressions:

Kinda weird, sparse without being ambient, with some post-rock elements. Not quite my cup 'o tea, but I love this business model.

[Jackie Blue]

$5 for two hours is a great deal even if a lot of it is just ambient music.

I mean, fuck, I paid $15 for Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 and I think $18 for Lifeforms.

[rynne]

Goddamn, out of nowhere NIN just released a new single, "Discipline," with lyrics and everything to the radio this afternoon, and it'll be available for free download from the official website tonight.  From the snippet I heard, it sounds like With Teeth stuff, very radio-friendly, completely different than Ghosts. 

Reznor's really taking advantage of not having to bother with any record company red tape, which is pretty cool, I think.

[Broken_Drum]

Goddamn, out of nowhere NIN just released a new single, "Discipline," with lyrics and everything to the radio this afternoon, and it'll be available for free download from the official website tonight.  From the snippet I heard, it sounds like With Teeth stuff, very radio-friendly, completely different than Ghosts. 

Reznor's really taking advantage of not having to bother with any record company red tape, which is pretty cool, I think.

Up on nin.com now. There's also speculation of a new EP/ album to be released in July. I quite like Discipline, very catchy, I just hope every song doesn't sound like that on the new release. I'm sure T Rizzler won't disappoint though.

[KvP]

I really don't like the new song. There's nothing that jumps out at me, it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Most of all, there's nothing interesting going on in the music itself.

[rynne]

After hearing the official download on good headphones, it reminds me of the dancier stuff from With Teeth, like "Only" or "All the Love in the World," but with a sound palette that's closer to some elements that showed up on Ghosts.  That suits me fine for a (lead?) single.  That being said, I'd really doubt that all of the next EP/album/whatever would be in this style.

*edit* Explanation from Reznor to one of the fan boards:

You guys...
I've skimmed around a bit here seeing what the mob has to say. I'm posting here because I don't want this to be "official".
Interesting reading comparisons to WT and PHM. The truth is, this track just came out "as is". I am obviously aware of how "poppy" it is and that should be taken as no indication of what other music I may or may not be working on might sound like. It's almost summer, it felt right, it was refreshing after GHOSTS, I went with it.
Freedom from the infrastructure of record labels means immediate turn-around time from me to you, if that's the plan. It's exciting to be able to do that and it's affecting my method of working at the moment. I suspect soon I will purposely take more time away and work differently - perhaps more calculated and deliberate. For now, this method is stimulating to me and is yielding results I'm pleased with.
What in the hell am I saying? Take your fucking shirts off and dance!

[Jackie Blue]

"Disciplline" is crap.  It's not quite as crap as With Teeth, but I'm sticking with my assertion that Ghosts is basically the only noteworthy thing he's done since Broken / Fixed.

[rynne]

I'm intrigued now.  I've seen a lot of opinions of "NIN turned crap after [release X]" but I don't think I've even heard anyone draw that line immediately following Fixed.  Almost everyone I've talked to who liked Broken and Fixed have liked The Downward Spiral or The Fragile better than those EPs.  Conversely, most people who don't like TDS or TF tend to believe the band peaked with Pretty Hate Machine and immediately started downhill with Broken.  May I ask why you chose that point as your cut-off?

[Jackie Blue]

I liked The Downward Spiral when it came out.  When I was 18 and angry and listened to a lot more goth-industrial music.  Immediately following that, around '94, I got into Pavement, got way more into Sonic Youth than I had been, listened to more Camper Van Beethoven, and basically realised that a lot of the music I had been into was not terrible but was also not really fitting my mood anymore.

Pretty Hate Machine has some silly songs on it in retrospect, but it's also damn catchy and dancey and ambiguously sexual, things which Trent never really explored again after that album.

Broken still stands up to me as being musically solid without the lyrics degenerating too far into LiveJournal territory.  It's exciting to listen to.

Fixed takes most of the crappy lyrics out of Broken and makes the songs much more harsh and industrial, particularly the track Foetus remixed.

After that, it's all pretty crap.  The Fragile had nice ambient moments but was perpetually mediocre in most other ways.  With Teeth was so bad I couldn't believe my friends were pushing it on me as a great album.  Year Zero was just more of the same.  And for the love of God do not get me started on Niggy Tardust.  I hated Saul Williams enough before that album.

[rynne]

Fair enough.  I, too, got into NIN as an angsty teen circa Broken.  For a while they were my FAVORITE BAND EVAR, but I wouldn't claim that now (Jim Thirlwell's projects hold that spot now, though NIN is obviously responsible for introducing me to his music).  For the most part, though, I've appreciated NIN's albums over the years.  I'd put The Fragile as their low point: it was a bloated mopey mess that should've been a single-disc album at best.

[Lines]

The new single is good, but it's not impressive. It is kind of like the more dance-like tracks from With Teeth, but it's lacking that extra something. I'm sure it'll do well on the radio, but I typically don't like the NIN songs that are played on the radio compared to the rest of the album.

[KvP]

Nine Inch Nails have always been sort of a gateway band for me, which is why even when I don't have much of a problem acknowledging the glaring weaknesses of the music I still buy and enjoy everything they put out. Just about every band I've become obsessed with in the last 7 or 8 years - Aphex Twin, Coil, Autechre, Boards of Canada, on and on, they all sort of originate from that first intense preoccupation with NIN. I imagine it's the same with Nirvana or the Clash with other people.

[Jackie Blue]

I think a more apt comparison would be Weezer.

Nirvana didn't stay around long enough to get to the "now we're just phoning it in" phase (thank God).

[rynne]

Nine Inch Nails have always been sort of a gateway band for me, which is why even when I don't have much of a problem acknowledging the glaring weaknesses of the music I still buy and enjoy everything they put out. Just about every band I've become obsessed with in the last 7 or 8 years - Aphex Twin, Coil, Autechre, Boards of Canada, on and on, they all sort of originate from that first intense preoccupation with NIN. I imagine it's the same with Nirvana or the Clash with other people.

Same here.  I'd go so far as to say NIN was my gateway to music appreciation: before I picked up Pretty Hate Machine, I had a couple of the standard early-90s albums—Nevermind, Ten, Metallica—but didn't particularly give a shit about music.  And though I've broadened my horizons considerably since then, a lot of my favorite bands are pretty much directly or aesthetically related to them: Foetus, Current 93 (via Coil), Aphex Twin, Chris Connelly (via Ministry side projects), Killing Joke.

But yeah, there's not much NIN that I don't honestly enjoy, The Fragile being the biggest exception.

[Jackie Blue]

I guess that's the reason I was never WAYYYYY into NIN.  By the time I bought PHM, I was already into Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Foetus, Sisters of Mercy, Front 242, all the "old" industrial (Gristle, Cab Voltaire, ClockDVA, etc).  So I liked PHM but didn't even think of it in the same terms as any of those artists.  To me it was more like "Prince is white and on drugs", which is what I liked about it, and when I heard the "Get Down Make Love" cover I was sold.

Then he went all aggro, dropped ALL sexual ambiguity, and I was left with "Well, this is alright, but if I wanted to listen to angry guitars and drum machines, I already own a copy of Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste".

Then he seemed to stop aging - meaning he never grew up - because suddenly I was listening to a 40+ year old man whine bad poetry, and all I could think at that point was "Aging Gracefully - See: Thirlwell, Jim; Snog; Cave, Nick; Bowie, David - Avoid: Reznor, Trent; Jourgenson, Al; Puppy, Skinny".

But I guess I can buy the argument that if you never listened to industrial before NIN, you'd love it, just like kids who had never heard Pavement liked Weezer.

[rynne]

Well, yeah.  A 13-year-old growing up in the suburbs with no musical knowledge aside from MTV knew nothing about first-wave Industrial in 1992.  Big surprise, right?   

Now that I'm more familiar with the whole picture, I realized what I like about NIN is how Reznor took whatever bizarre textures and applied them to pop song forms---that's something I think he did much better than his predecessors, except perhaps for Thirlwell.   I see him as a middle point along the line connecting the dancier of the old-school industrial/EBM acts (early Cab Voltaire, early Skinny Puppy, Front 242) and more recent acts like The Knife.

[KvP]

Another new song. I sort of like the back end of it. That's 1 for 2 this record.

Also, more Ghosts songs from the deluxe package - 37 and 38

[Jackie Blue]

Echoplex is vaguely interesting near the end, but it basically is a mediocre Strokes riff over a mediocre drum machine beat.

Also, Trent, please, STOP SINGING.  I swear to God nobody has developed less as a lyricist in the entire history of music.

These new songs are making me feel stupid for liking Ghosts I-IV so much and thinking he might head in a good new direction.  Instead, we get rehashed "sort of like my first two albums, right?  right?" songs.  MEH.

[Töys]

time to check out nin.com

[KvP]

Yep. Free album.

[Caspian]

I have never heard a NIN song before and had no plans too, but hey, it's free. Obviously Trent's onto something with this business model.

[Thrillho]

How has the guy gone from releasing one album every five or six years to releasing the equivalent of four records in two?

[Broken_Drum]

I'm really liking the new album, nothing outstanding but a solid release. Demon Seed and Lights In The Sky are amazing.

[Der Turm, der Leute frass]

How has the guy gone from releasing one album every five or six years to releasing the equivalent of four records in two months?

fixed

[amok]

This is pretty good, first half is somewhere between PHM and With Teeth, then it goes trippy and weird at the end. Enjoyed the first listen a lot more than Year Zero. Or indeed anything since Broken.

[Broken_Drum]

Anyone else notice the AIR flag on the artwork for Letting You?

[Thrillho]

How has the guy gone from releasing one album every five or six years to releasing the equivalent of four records in two months?

fixed

...Year Zero was last year, Ghosts was two discs, and the new one is fourth disc. That's four in two years, or three in two months.

[rynne]

How has the guy gone from releasing one album every five or six years to releasing the equivalent of four records in two?

He got off the booze and the coke.

[Johnny C]

Also, Trent, please, STOP SINGING.  I swear to God nobody has developed less as a lyricist in the entire history of music.

The fact that it's an instrumental record means that easily the worst part of any NIN release is already out of the equation.

[KvP]

Man, Trent's changed a lot. Not just in the frequency of his releases, but in how much he dominates them. This record was recorded by the live band and obviously not fussed over at all from a production standpoint. The sound's a little muted.

[TheoristB]

So far I like the record.  Recording with the live band has certainly helped add a certain level of rawness to the record that past NIN releases haven't had.  It definitely sounds like a band and not a dude and a bunch of studio time building up these big tracks filled with sounds and textures.  The fact that I can picture all of these songs being performed live is pretty exciting.

[StaedlerMars]

I like this album.

Trent's obviously doing what he wants to do.

He might be raising expectations a bit too high though. I might be expecting a new album every few months now.

That or he'll just do a lot of touring. Doesn't he need to to support this?

[KvP]

They're embarking on an American tour in a few weeks, yeah.

[Caspian]

This stuff's OK but I was expecting something a little bit stranger. Seems like it's just slightly odd modern rock (maybe that's what NIN always sounded like, I dunno). Love the production, though, I'm a big fan of muted, live-sounding production, and the gratitious fuzziness and distortion is good times.

[Halitosis]

They're embarking on an American tour in a few weeks, yeah.

That's plenty of time for an EP, at the very least.

[rynne]

Apparently The Slip was mastered on May 2 for release on May 5.  That's a helluva turnaround time.

[De_El]

Hey guys I wrote a NIN EP. It's called Fuck You, You Fucking Pig. Here's the tracklist:

1. Get Down on Your Hands and Knees, You Goddamned Pig
2. Scabs Are Distracting and I Have a Sunburn (Peeling Skin)
3. I Am Big Dick with a Big Dick, So Suck My Dick
4. At This Point I Must Admit I Am Fond of Whores
5. Fisting Hurts (Now You Know What It Feels Like)
Hidden Track: A Cover of That Angel Song That Got Mis-Labeled as NIN on P2P Networks Seriously What Was Up With That It Didn't Even Sound Like Me

(btw, I actually quite like the new album so far, this is all in good fun)

[rynne]

What of the classic "A Song About Fucking (Filthy Pig Fuck)"?  Or "Into This Voidy Twilight Is Where My Hurt Belongs (Version)"?

[Jackie Blue]

I think Trent is off video games.  In one 90s interview he said "if I spent as much time making music as I do playing DOOM, I'd release an album every few months".

Looks like he finally got bored of FPS's.

[Broken_Drum]

So my Ultra Deluxe Edition of Ghosts arrived today; she's beautiful.

And especially for the guy who requested pictures:







Sorry about the quality and the size. I may upload some of the vinyl later if anyone's interested.

[Thrillho]

Sweet dancing Jehova that's good lookin'.

As for the new album... it's too synthetic for my liking, just like Year Zero was. It's so... blank. Grey. I mean, I know Fragile and Downward Spiral were emo as fuck as far as emotional adulthood, but they were alive with different shades, even if they were shades of grey.