Nod Your Head Because You Know That I’m Right

Nine Inch Nails “Capital G” – With Teeth is an okay album, but it’s hard not to think of it as being much more than Trent Reznor’s (rather successful) attempt to re-establish the Nine Inch Nails brand after a lengthy absence and a double album that won strong reviews, but failed to launch any major hit singles. (It’s a shame that “Into The Void” never caught on — it’s one of his best songs, but the timing was all wrong.) Year Zero is weirder and less accessible, but it’s a much better and more appealing record. It doesn’t quite hold up as a concept album on a lyrical level (a shocker, I know), but it’s an exceptional set of compositions that mostly side-step NIN cliches while foregrounding the sort of musical details, programming tics, and colorful quirks that have always been at the core of the band’s appeal.

Year Zero emphasizes rhythm and texture, and though most songs follow some variation of a verse-chorus-verse structure, the cumulative effect is that of walking aimlessly through an unfamiliar landscape. The style of sound is familiar from previous NIN releases, but the emotional specificity is absent, and replaced by a sense of confusion and discomfort. A lot of the lyrics basically revisit the themes of Pretty Hate Machine‘s “Head Like A Hole,” but the anger is muted and diffuse, and in some of the songs (most notably the glammy “Capital G”) Reznor inhabits the mindset of a fascist creep rather than just rail against a faceless enemy.

The lyrics aren’t exactly good, but they aren’t totally bad either — if we’re going to be very honest about this, they are at least as good as what we’ve come to expect from the average indie-ish rock band in this era. (Personally, I’ll take this college freshman version of Philip K Dick and Chuck Palahniuk over the dreadful “literate” lyrics of a guy like Colin Meloy, though that’s not really a knock on the Decemberists’ music.) Reznor has always had a bad rap in this department, and though I don’t think lyrics have ever been his strong suit, when his words work, it’s usually because they are of a piece with the music. Go back and listen to a lot of the old NIN classics — can you possibly imagine lyrics that would be more suitable for those arrangements? In most cases, the lyrics are like subtitles for what’s being expressed musically — “I WANT TO FUCK YOU LIKE AN ANIMAL!!!,” “I’D RATHER DIE THAN GIVE YOU CONTROL!!!,” “GOD IS DEAD AND NO ONE CARES!!!,” “POISON TO MY ROTTEN CORE, TOO FUCKED UP TO CARE ANYMORE!!!” There is no subtlety whatsoever, but the feeling is visceral, urgent, and emotionally true. Sometimes people say exactly what they mean, and sometimes we need art that will directly articulate extreme emotions for us rather than fuck around or get embarrassed by itself. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)