You’re Not Really What You Know You Are

Nine Inch Nails “Burning Bright (Field on Fire)”

Trent Reznor approaches record formats like a painter – some works are large canvasses, others are diptychs or murals, and a few here and there are miniatures. Not the Actual Events is in the latter category along with Broken and the first How to Destroy Angels EP. As with those previous small scale works, it’s a complete thought with a distinctive aesthetic. The songs have the raw garage punk urgency of The Slip, but it’s far more cluttered and abrasive, and mostly avoids the melody and harmony at the core of even Reznor’s heaviest music.

Not the Actual Events is a deliberate mess; it’s a calculated replica of a chaotic state of mind. It starts off with a punk song that cuts out just as it starts to accelerate, as if the song just crashed into a wall, and then lurches though a middle section that sounds lost, desperate, and confused. Reznor and Atticus Ross go wild with texture – there’s a lot of clashing and overlapping planes of sound, and stuff that sounds like Joy Division strangling My Bloody Valentine guitar parts to death. Reznor’s voice is present through the whole thing, but it’s often obscured or nearly incoherent as he recites lyrics that are closer to free verse than his usual rhythmic and melodic cadences. The themes aren’t far off from where he was last time around on Hesitation Marks – he’s afraid of backsliding into old habits and destroying the life he’s built, and overwhelmed with paranoia about a world in decline. It all ends with a sort of thwarted catharsis in which Reznor finds the strength and clarity to push back against all of this anxiety, and he gives himself some space for a clear, relatively calm vocal melody to cut through the blaring guitar. But in the same song where he’s singing about being forgiven and free, he’s telling himself “you’re not really what you know you are.” It doesn’t feel like a victory.

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