Album Review

Seeing Nine Inch Nails live flipped a switch in me. I was confronted by my relationship to music, realising lately I've been blindly consuming rather than experiencing, and just by taking a moment to give records the full attention they deserve as pieces of art, I can appreciate them better. The songs performed from this album deeply contributed to this realisation, the type you know to be true but don't really know unless it is a posteriori, and so it is the subject of my first attempt at an album review. Review is an inaccurate word, mostly these are just random observations that relate to my personal experience of the album, and though they may not be "useful" to an outside reader, they are no less valuable to me.

Less Than, the track Add Violence opens with is misleading. It sounds like NIN at their most accessible, reminiscent of tracks such as Hand That Feeds and Discipline, with a hint of Depeche Mode. The lyrics are as relevant as ever, and perhaps more than ever as I write this. The rest of the album doesn't follow sonically, it is much more subdued and gloomy for the most part. Even so, the tracks work well together and the overall flow of the album is pretty smooth. The Lovers follows, and though I enjoy the instrumental, it's the lyricism here I really appreciate. There are two moods Trent Reznor excels at evoking, dread being one of them. (The other, well, that's for a different review.) That feeling is further compounded in This Isn't the Place and The Background World. The looping of the latter, as the song "deconstructs" itself, might be seen as a gimmick, taking up over 5 minutes, but for me it works. The more it distorts, the better I understand te complexities of the instrumental. Weirdly, it appeals to me also because its reminiscent of the type of horror I enjoy too: repetitive and uncanny, devolving into chaos with no way to stop it, even as you know exactly what's coming.

Favourite Tracks

• Less Than
• The Background World
• Not Anymore