Album: The Slip
Artist: Nine Inch Nails
Genre: Industrial Rock/Dark Ambient
Year: 2008
Label: The Null Corporation
Having no homework can be awesome. It can also be boring, too, which leaves me planted to write another review. Conveniently, Nine Inch Nails just released a new album, today! What a twist!!! I got into NIN with their “With Teeth” album and assumed, wrongly, that I would have to wait five years for another one. How wrong I was. These last few years have been full to bursting with Nine Inch music, “The Slip” is just the latest. Having listened to every single Nine Inch Nails album, remix album, live album and just about anything else I could get my hands on, I feel very qualified to review this one.
After the slow build intro of “999, 999” the album takes off with “1,000,000” (shocking) one of the most rocking tracks Nine Inch Nails has ever done. Not to say that previous works haven’t rocked, this one just seems to rock most obviously. Come to that, this may be the first time that Trent has allowed other musicians to play on the recording, or at least that’s what I’ve inferred from the liner notes. The album actually has a full band sound that sets it apart from earlier works, mainly because even when those sounded like full bands you know it’s all just Trent. Not this time it looks like. I would be remised not to mention the method of the release. Reznor is quickly outdoing Radiohead; actually, he’s already outdone them by leaps and bounds. Previous to this album he released the instrumental 36 track long “Ghosts I-IV”, which you could download at various qualities for a mere 5 dollars, and the album came with art work and liner notes and everything. “The Slip” was also released over the internet, but was released as a free download. Free! With artwork and everything! While Radiohead offered us to pay anything we wanted (including nothing) for their album “In Rainbows”, Trent hasn’t asked us to pay anything and allows for you to choose what format we want the music in, from MP3 to FLAC Lossless.
It would be a shame to go through all of this trouble and have the album be a disappointment. While things are business as usual at the NIN camp, business is good and has been for a long time. Lyrically, the evolution of Nine Inch Nails lyrics has never been great. Loss of identity, reality crumbling, insanity, misery and ultimately absorption into the void are all recurring topics from previous albums. But that’s exactly what NIN fans want to hear and that’s not a bad thing. The high point of the album is the music side rather than the lyrical. As I previously stated, this is one of the most rock oriented album NIN has released since “With Teeth”. “Year Zero” had its more rock moments (“The Beginning of the End” for example) but “Ghosts” was an excursion into instrumental and ambient territory not breached since “The Fragile”. While some could tout Trent for being unoriginal or repeating himself, “The Slip” is a blend of some of the more experimental noise sides of “Year Zero”, the haunting dreamlike quality of “Ghosts” and the straight ahead Industrial Rock of “With Teeth”. It finds this middle ground best on tracks like “Letting You” (a driving noise rock explosion) and Echoplex (a slow burning grind of Trent signature guitar style and piano melodies.)
Some of the most interesting tracks on the album are the instrumental ones. “Corona Radiata” sounds like a longer, slower big brother to “A Warm Place” from “The Downward Spiral”. It’s ambient, slow and almost barely feels like it’s there… but it is and it grows and grows until it peaks with the sound of a ten thousand recycled, but muffled screams (I even heard a cat in there), and then it ends. “Head Down” is a particular favorite of mine and the best of the rocker tracks on the album in my opinion, with its chorus of “This is not my face, this is not my life, and there is not a single thing here I can recognize” Sounds like the industrial rock version of The Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime”. The other real gem here is “Lights in the Sky,” a haunting piano tune in the tradition of songs like “Right Where it Belongs” from With Teeth. It’s beautiful in its despair and minimalism, the perfect slow note to cool things down before the instrumental section.
Overall, the album is strong and I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes Nine Inch Nails. Also, this is a good album to get if you’re new to the band considering it’s available for free. Excellent stuff.
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