It is a delicately-constructed précis of the album to follow: all the elaborate vocal arrangements over unconventional song structures, all of the relentlessly driving percussive forces, primarily electronic… all of the album’s spirit is rendered here, in just over five minutes. The story proper kicks off with “Copy of A”, which debuted as the first song in the first spectacular show of NIN’s 2013 tour at Fuji Rock festival, Japan (under a fierce, awe-inspiring lightning storm). It is a puzzling and disorienting opener, which leads perfectly into the emotional space of disillusionment and detachment framing the epic journey to follow. ![]() Unlike previous NIN album openers, many of which are also short vocal-less pieces that steadily build in intensity from silence, there is practically no recognizable instrumentation - only vaguely discernible snippets of voice distorted beyond recognition. Opening track “The Eater of Dreams” consists of ominous noises building one upon another. This is undeniably the most exciting and rewarding album NIN has released in a long time, and without a doubt the most elegant sonic portrait of Reznor’s riveting inner battles since the exquisitely raw With Teeth. On top of all that, it boasts insanely catchy pop song hooks with dance beats galore. The album feels haunting and unnerving, exercising notable restraint for showing and then hiding its layers, building and releasing tension in the listener for its 62 minutes. Each piece of music is a fractured and beautiful collage of noise, with the hallmarks of classic Reznor production techniques abundantly on display (deployed with his co-producers Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder lending their help, as they have for myriad Reznor-led projects). This description could just as well apply to the songs that composer and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has written and co-produced for Hesitation Marks, which reflect his matured persona as a calmer, more assured individual while still confronting the dark personal past that inspires his songwriting for NIN. They attempt to harness the chaos of a situation, of now, of the personal trauma, of the human condition, into a form that is coherent, a form that accommodates the mess without disguising it as something else. ![]() are a cross between the forensic and a pathology of the personal in which only fragments remain, in which minimal clues can suggest events that may have occurred. It’s also an apt description of the music on Hesitation Marks, which his art accompanies (and whose title he suggested) a fitful and restless collection of songs, with the indefinable quality that belongs to works dealing with the there-and-yet-not-there. “Presence in absence” is one of the enigmatic phrases that artist Russell Mills used in describing what he intended to suggest with his mixed-media works, thirty of them, specially commissioned to illuminate the new Nine Inch Nails album.
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