![]() ![]() And, though it may not be the motivating force that drives him, he clearly has within him a love for shock appeal. This, in fact, may be the most shocking thing about him. I think I kick into self-destruction mode once in a while.” It was things that I’ve dealt with and still deal with at times. “And I address some ugly things and some desperate moments on the record, looking for consolation in perhaps the wrong things-through religion, through sex, through empowerment, through drugs. “I wanted to make a record that worked as a theme through the whole thing, one of self-examination and (self)-discovery and (self)-destruction at the same time, but what could end up being a healthy process, of shedding some blankets of blindness that you surround yourself with. “I was interested in exploring some more bleak terrain on this record,” says Reznor, 28, in what may qualify as the understatement of the year. So while there’s nothing resembling a possible hit single on the album, which Reznor tried to create without thinking about the pressure to produce an alternative blockbuster, the Zeitgeist could be just right to elevate NIN a few twists higher on the upward spiral of stardom anyway. 7 and one of its tracks won last year’s Grammy for best metal performance with vocal.Ĭlearly, Reznor’s confessionals have tapped a vein of youthful alienation that yearns for a more extreme expression than Nirvana’s more archly rendered Angst. Much to his amazement, it entered the Billboard charts at No. As exhilaratingly well-made as it is spiritually exhausting ( see review, ), its landing is likely to leave a major depression-no pun intended.Įver since Nine Inch Nails blew audiences away as the surprise hit of the 1991 “Lollapalooza” tour-suddenly quadrupling the sales of its 1989 debut, “Pretty Hate Machine,” well past the million mark-the stakes have been raised for whatever follow-up Reznor might design.Ī year and a half ago, to alleviate the pressure, he released a defiantly uncommercial mini-album, “Broken,” and didn’t do any touring to publicize it. “Spiral” arrives this week as one of the most anticipated albums of the year. Parts of “The Downward Spiral” are so intense they almost make that pathological photo atlas on Reznor’s coffee table look like a walk in the park.īut if it’s scary stuff, not everyone is frightened off. The descending arc of the new album runs from punkish broadsides against society, rage against religion and conformity, examinations of such escapist satisfactions as animalistic sex, into full-on, shockingly uncensored self-hatred-suicidal tendencies included. But in the studio, Reznor works primarily alone, creating highly computerized music so dark and so personal that it indeed comes to sound like the most secret innards of one man’s skull, scraped out, perhaps, with a blunt instrument. A true artist has met a true artist.On the road, with a revolving lineup of musicians, Nine Inch Nails actually becomes the rock ‘n’ roll band its name would promise. This is the aftermath of the defiance that Reznor so brilliantly articulates throughout the album. In this sense, they feel like artefacts remnants of a close, but ugly past. They are stark, confronting, raw symbolically allusionary, they hint at the carnage that has come before. Now, when looking at the works that Mills produced for the album, there is a feeling of utter annihilation. He describes, in an article he wrote for Self-titled mag, that first conference call with Reznor and his then management as surreal from rural england, in the shadow of Shakespeare, to American rockstars and serious conference calls. In 1994, when Trent Reznor, frontman for NIN, contacted British painter, designer and collagist, Russel Mills, commissioning him to produce a world of works (25 in total) for The Downward Spiral, he asked Russel to keep a few words in mind- ‘attrition’, ‘wound’ and ‘decay’.Īt the time Mills was in the middle of working on a year-long commission, producing all of the print campaign material for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Unlike its cover art and slip-case (‘The Downward Spiral’ and ‘Wound’ respectively) the album’s power is not in its subtly. In all senses it is a cathartic explosion that rallies against the American mainstream, the superficiality of modern consumerism and the crippling isolation of the culturally disenfranchised. The psychological duality of helplessness and defiance vulnerability and bitterness misery and rage. Holding no punches, it is an industrial, nail-biting, jaw dropping, nut-crunching exploration into humankind’s eternal conflicts. Nine Inch Nails’ magnum opus, The Downward spiral, is a bleak, visceral and harrowing concept album that explores some of the darkest points of human experience. ![]()
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