4/5 stars
Trent Reznor is sure keeping busy this year, recording and releasing two albums, genius marketing, touring, and proclaiming to the world the evils of corparate music(take that Rolling Stones). His most the recent release, "The Slip," is being given away for free over his own
website, which is not an unprecedented move. Radiohead beat him to it, but as Trent Reznor pointed out, Radiohead backed out, saying that it was just a marketing scheme to drum up publicity. So is this album the sequel to "Year Zero" that he promised, or is this back to business as usual? I'm not totally sure, some lyrics are very direct references to the "Year Zero" theme, "you train us how to act, you keep the fear intact," or "your armies full of hate, believing your charade." Other lyrics are just as suicidal as "The Downward Spiral," "put the gun, in my mouth, close your eyes, blow my fucking brains out, pretty patterns on the floor." Personally, I could care less what the theme of this album is, Trent Reznor has never been a lyrical genius. Nine Inch Nails has always been more about the emotion you hear in the vocals and music, rather than what he is actually singing about.
"The Slip" is the best Nine Inch Nails album since "The Fragile," and it is the noisiest music he has created since "The Downward Spiral." The album opens with the ambient white noise of "999, 999" and then "1, 000, 000" comes right after with a blast of distorted guitars and crashing drums. It is a song that would have easily fit on the "Broken" EP. The song, much like the rest of the album is filled with suicidal lyrics like "I jump from every rooftop, so high, so far to fall." Then the even noisier "Letting You" comes right afterwards, filled with guitar notes that seem to be picked at random. Easily the best song on the album, this song sounds like it was written for "The Downward Spiral." The first single "Discipline" is a slinky song that grows on you with each listen. Trent Reznor's misery hasn't sounded this sexy since 1994. About a halfway through the album the music completely changes from the heavy industrial into piano ballad "Lights in the Sky" which is a relatively weak song. What saves it from the skip button, is the rawness of it, almost sounding like you are sitting right on the piano bench with Trent, as he composes the song in his whispered vocals. After that the album starts to sound like "Ghosts" with ambient instrumentals "Corona Radiata" and "The Four of Us are Dying" which are both superb. They feel like short glances into Trent Reznor's totally fucked up head. The album ends with "Demon Seed" which is probably the worst name for a song ever, and also the weakest song on the album.
"The Slip" is incredible, adrenaline charged music, that has a sense of urgency to it. The two halfs of the album don't fit together very well, with such a huge change in tempo. But for the most part the quality of the music makes up for any flaws in the order of the songs.
