nine inch nails

[pzyktzle]

well i already went last time they came, and it was great except for the with teet tracks. this time they'll hav that crap AND the new stuff. doesn't sound very appealing.. and no free tickets.

i had the same experience. i got really into his live performance when he toured last year, but every time a with teeth track was played i was jarred out of it.

i like year zero a lot more than with teeth. a lot more. which isn't saying all that much really.

[bonanzataz]

so i'm on track six. year zero, from what i'm hearing right now, is just so radically different from old nine inch nails. he's really expanded on the sound he was trying to create on with teeth, which i feel must have been a transitional album. plus, i've said before, after several listens, with teeth is pretty fucking good. there's no way that with teeth could've lived up to its expectations. i mean, coming after downward spiral and the fragile, everybody was expecting another complex, dark masterpiece. as it is, with teeth is simply a very good album, i think it's unfair that it gets so uniformly maligned on this board. year zero, i was worried, was going to rely solely on its concept and marketing campaign and would be a step down from with teeth, marking the steady decline of the band. but, what i'm hearing negates that. it shows me that on with teeth, trent and co. were trying something new and testing out the waters. here, the sounds are a bit more complex, the beats are a bit dancier, it just seems to gel a little more. i can see myself listening to this one for a while. but only time will tell.

they just need to make good videos again.

[Pubrick]

fine i'll go.

BUT THIS IS THE LAST TIME.

[bonanzataz]

haha, didn't really take too much convincing, did it?

[MacGuffin]

Nine Inch Nails' Year Almost Here, But Real-World Game Continues
Some 60 fans gather in L.A. to collect 'resistance kits' — part of band's mysterious marketing scheme.
Source: MTV

LOS ANGELES — On a sun-streaked Friday evening, on the corner of Melrose Avenue and Ogden Street, underneath a mural featuring a bleary-eyed Uncle Sam and a giant pig with the Washington monument and a revolver strapped to its back, roughly 60 black-clad people milled about on the sidewalk. It was a bizarre assembly of people who don't assemble for much — made even more bizarre by the fact that no one was really sure why they'd gathered there in the first place.

Here's what everyone did know: Last week, followers of the ever-expanding Alternate Reality Game surrounding Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero album received an e-mail from OpenSourceResistance.net, one of many Web sites established by Trent Reznor and company to help spread the story behind Zero.

In the message, the organizer of OSR (a man named Neil Czerno, who claims to be a clandestine revolutionary battling the oppressive government that dominates the album's story line) advised members of a meeting taking place in Los Angeles on Friday. In typical YZ fashion, little else was divulged.

"If you're interested, show up near Melrose and Ogden at or a little after 7 p.m. on Friday evening. Wear something that shows you're one of us," the e-mail read. "Stand under the big pig and follow the revolver across the street to the marked van. Knock twice. When you've got the stuff, get out of there fast. Don't attract attention. Don't be followed."

And so on Friday evening, they showed up, wearing black NIN T-shirts and homemade resistance arm bands. There were even some families, moms and dads with kids in strollers ... all a little bit anxious, all waiting beneath the same mural, all waiting to see what would happen when the online ARG took the leap into the real world. 

"Me and my friends were making jokes that we might get abducted and taken to some undisclosed location in the desert, or something like that. And we would have been OK with that," joked fan David Norstad, decked out in a black leather jacket with NIN stencils on the sleeves. "We just got an e-mail to show up by the mural and wait for the van, and I love this Tom Clancy kind of crap. I've never seen a more brilliant back story to an album. It goes to show that you can get your word out about the art without being too commercial about it, flashing too many billboards."

A few minutes after 7, a gun-metal gray van pulled up to the Smart & Final warehouse store across the street, threw it into park and waited. The throngs of fans dashed through the late-evening traffic on Melrose and queued up behind the vehicle. Soon, the back door of the van swung open, and out popped several muscle-y dudes, who quickly surveyed the situation and started handing out black metal cases, each stenciled with OSR's flag logo.

Inside the cases — or "resistance kits," as they were being dubbed — were 10 OSR fliers, 10 buttons, four stickers and one stencil, plus a host of materials (hat, bandanna and patch) emblazoned with the resistance logo, a sort of guerilla street team in a box.

But that wasn't all. One of the event organizers, who wouldn't reveal his name, told MTV News that three of the cases also contained cell phones, which the folks behind OSR would be calling "at an undisclosed time" with instructions for a future gathering.

Nine Inch Nails' label, Interscope Records, had no comment on the gathering, or what was next for the Year Zero ARG. And though it's not known if the OSR gathering will be replicated in other cities, attendees in Los Angeles hope that the movement — and the message — behind the album reaches their resistance brethren across the world.

"If there's some art-resistance movement happening in L.A., I'm down for it. I think it's about taking art and making a political statement with it. Because there's not a lot of that going on these days," NIN fan Natalie Potell said. "So maybe it's making people open their eyes a bit. It's an album, but it's more than an album. It's got its own little movement behind it."

[MacGuffin]

Nine Inch Nails creates a world from 'Year Zero'
Real-world concerns filter into a gamers' paradise as Trent Reznor mixes it up.
Source: Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times

There's a misconception afoot about "Year Zero," the latest project from musical puppet master Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails. Launched in February with a cryptic message on a tour T-shirt, fleshed out in dozens of websites, scary voicemail messages, Morse code blips, murals, fliers and other real-world propaganda, "Year Zero" reaches a peak (but not its conclusion) with today's album release. There's never been such an extensive or well-planned campaign involving a major pop release. But "Year Zero" represents something more than just killer marketing.

Reznor has been complaining that the alternate reality game, or ARG, set in motion before the album's release has been portrayed as separate and subservient to the album. He's right. "Year Zero" isn't just a cyberpunk "Dark Side of the Moon" augmented by a few impressive Web-based extras. Nor is it merely a game, the latest take on Quake with an amazing soundtrack. (Reznor did, incidentally, write the music and effects for that bestselling shooter game.)

"Year Zero" is a total marriage of the pop and gamer aesthetics that unlocks the rusty cages of the music industry and solves some key problems facing rock music as its cultural dominance dissolves into dust.

It's easy for even Reznor appreciators to overlook this accomplishment, because "Year Zero" also works as pure pop. Composed mostly on a laptop and inspired by the Situationist hip-hop of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad production team, its 16 tracks reinvigorate Reznor's most effective sonic tricks: surface noise, extreme dynamic shifts, dinosaur riffing and the slashes of prettiness that drive light into the hard stuff.

Reznor's been picking at these elements forever, rearranging them, exploring their inner structures, breaking them apart.

He's been criticized for being insular, but think of Reznor as Tolkien, not Timbaland, and the repetitions make sense. He's building a world, and that world needs its own language, and language establishes itself through trial and error.

In his own universe

After the grim, hit-hungry perfectionism of the group's previous album, 2005's "With Teeth," it's great to hear Reznor sprawl out in his own universe again.

But to stop at the music is to miss what "Year Zero" accomplishes as a larger, ongoing work. In fact, it may be a mistake to even start with the music. Hard-core NIN fans and online game enthusiasts have been adding up the ARG's clues to uncover its "X-Files"-like narrative, a compelling vision of a near-future afflicted by multiple calamities.

Grainy and hard to navigate, full of text and images so commonplace they feel real, these interlocking pages (executed by veteran game designers 42 Entertainment) don't tell a story; they lock the participant into an experience that feels both personal and epic. That's exactly what Reznor's music does. Equal parts whisper and arena-sized punch, it immerses listeners into an emotional state that their own responses come to mirror.

The songs on "Year Zero," each from the perspective of a character or characters already existent in the ARG, draw a connection between the music fan's passionate identification with songs and the gamer's experience of becoming someone else online.

Though it's supposedly a leap that Reznor's not writing about his own pain anymore, he still puts his gift for the ultra-personal to good use. The frantic first single, "Survivalism," reveals the inner thoughts of a resistance leader; "Vessel" does the same for a religious fanatic; "The Good Soldier," with its swaggering drum line beat, captures the reluctance of a military man.

Lyrics describing group experiences still circle back to the individual. Even the beautiful, cataclysmic closing suite, with its images of nuclear winter, focuses on a dying lover's tender plea. Melodramatic on their own, Reznor's lyrics gain believability when heard under the encompassing sway of the game.

Reznor has always been tuned into alternate realities, mostly those that occupy and distort the minds of average, uptight social outcasts. He emerged during the 1990s heyday of psychological rock, when fellow angsty boys Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were making generational anthems about sexual confusion, personal drift and the sorrows of the broken home.

A tech nerd with roots in meticulous synth pop instead of punk or metal, Reznor made screamingly intense music about repression and its consequences; his great themes were sadomasochism (literal and metaphorical) and mental disorder.

Personal to political

Whatever personal issues propelled Reznor toward this ugly subject matter, his genius in the studio made his obsessions blossom into art. The Nine Inch Nails sound quickly evolved from plain industrial rock to the satanic equivalent of the Beach Boys — infinitely complex explorations of the way musical structures can mirror the ups and downs of an interior life.

On "Year Zero," he's reaching beyond his usual fascination with personal (or interpersonal) torment to confront group dynamics — specifically, politics. But he's still most skilled at evoking the way the mind works in isolation.

This is where the multitiered experience of "Year Zero" intersects with the worldview it presents to show how pop music can communicate in a new way. The isolated experience of politics is ideology — the personal, even isolated, absorption of a set of beliefs. Embracing an ideology is a lot like playing an alternate reality game. You commit; you move where the rules lead; you risk failure if you doubt the path.

The usual model for political pop is to state ideas or conviction in an anthem or a ballad — to foreground meaning over experience. But hard rock has always been more about body-shaking physical possession than words.

On "Year Zero," Reznor attempts to explore the physical experience of political ideology — how it feels to believe, or to rebel. His soldiers and subversives and faithful idiots speak in bromides, but the music, embedded with dissonance and sudden squalls of beauty, gives each character his own imperfect, powerful voice.

Factor in the listener's experience of "Year Zero" on the Web and in community with other fans, and you have an event that bowls over the boundaries of the usual pop release.

Reznor promises to continue the "Year Zero" project into a new recording, and possibly a feature film. I hope he opts against that second option and sticks with more innovative forms.

Writing on the ARGoriented site unfiction.com, a theorist whose pseudonym is "Spacebass" coined the term "chaotic fiction" to describe the particular art of alternative reality gaming; such a phrase also fits music that strives to create a universe while staying open-ended enough for fans to find themselves within it.

At the very least, Trent Reznor is still creating chaotic rock 'n' roll. And that's more than marketing; it's pioneering art.

[Pozer]

track #13 starts out so good then goes bleh so quick

[bonanzataz]

really? i kind of like when it turns into an abstraction of weird electronic beats.

overall, i like the first half of the album better. the last half strives for a more stripped down electronic feel, i think, but ultimately it just feels like boring rehashes of all the songs that came before. everything just starts to sound a little too similar and one track is nearly indistinguishable from another. i mean, "god given" is pretty bitchin', but it sounds a lot like "the good soldier" without the cool bassline.

anybody feel the same way?

[MacGuffin]

overall, i like the first half of the album better.

I do too. While I do appreciate Trent getting back to a "concept" album, after a few listens, I wouldn't put this album ahead of With Teeth, which I agree with taz is an underappreciated work.

[Pozer]

really? i kind of like when it turns into an abstraction of weird electronic beats.

i do like that too, but think it shouldve came back to what it was doing in the beginning.  couldve been the best song on there if it did that.  i agree with the rest of what you said.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

I felt that With Teeth felt kind of cold, lacking a lot of musical textures that Reznor is masterful with, but this took the landscapes of the Fragile and mixed it with the single-oriented tunes of With Teeth, so I think it's definitely a step in the right direction.

[grand theft sparrow]

While I do appreciate Trent getting back to a "concept" album, after a few listens, I wouldn't put this album ahead of With Teeth, which I agree with taz is an underappreciated work.

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

When Downward Spiral came out, I wore out the cassette.  When The Fragile came out, I played both discs into the ground.  When With Teeth came out, I played it a fair amount but not as much as I did the others.  My friend gave me a leaked version of Year Zero two weeks before it was released.  I have listened to it twice all the way through with a couple of extra listens to a few tracks.  Whenever I acquire a leaked album, I tend to buy the CD the day it hits the streets to ease my guilty conscience.  I haven't done that yet with this.  I don't doubt it'll grow on me some more (as I don't grimace anymore at Wish Redux Survivalism like I did when I first heard it on myspace) but I don't know that it'll make its way past With Teeth for me.

[MacGuffin]

Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor has lashed out at his record company in blog posts on the band's Web site. "As the climate grows more and more desperate for record labels, their answer to their mostly self-inflicted wounds seems to be to screw the consumer over even more," he wrote. "A couple of examples that quickly come to mind: The absurd retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia. Shame on you, [Universal Music Group]. Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars (or $29.10 in the States). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne's record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 U.S.)." When Reznor asked his label about the pricing of the LP, he said he was told "it's because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out." So, Reznor surmised, "I guess as a reward for being a 'true fan,' you get ripped off."

[Pubrick]

hahaha, at least now he knows where i'm coming from.

also i saw them a week ago and while i don't think i'll ever listen to their new album more than twice this year, they really bring it live. i can't stress that enough. i don't know how he does it but the songs i would not even pay attention to from the new stuff is just GREAT live. they do a pretty lean show, so pretty much no filler.

shame again about the douche bags surrounding me at the concert. seriously trent isn't even promoting that embarrassing get-up anymore so why is everyone still cutting themselves? anyway, there is some hope, there were a lot more "normal" ppl there this time. but for the most part if you looked at an aerial image of the grounds it would appear that a massive black hole was forming in the middle of brisbane that nite. it's a shame cos a lot of the girls are pretty. and pretty stupid.

in conclusion, avril's "girlfriend" is one of the best pop songs of the year.

[Pozer]

cool by the way.  i gots to go when they come around again come... whenever.  missed two opportunities last time.  thirds a charm, eh?