Nine Inch Nails

I found out this evening that Nine Inch Nails just today released their seventh album, The Slip, totally and completely balls-out free a short five days after finishing it. I very much commend this decision, and I hope to see more established artists do in in the future. And Trent Reznor seems like a pretty nice and genuinely appreciative guy.

Unfortunately, I just finished listening to the album, and it's truly terrible. It starts out promising enough with a cool little atmospheric intro song followed by a pretty fun and straightforward song... a really simple propulsive drum beat under ripsaw power chords, probably the closest thing NIN will ever record to punk rock. And after that, everything is pretty much terrible bullshit that falls into one of two categories:

1) Stuff that sounds like a terrible parody of "The Downward Spiral" and "The Fragile": The lyrics are skull-boringly simple and deal with alienation and depression in broad-to-the-point-of-meaningless ways. For a dude who has been sober for several years and is now working with unbridled creative freedom with no one to answer to but himself, I don't understand why he's still singing about being in a hole cut off from himself staring into the broken mirror telling himself to stop when he knows he can't blah blah blah. Give me a fucking break.

2) Vapid instrumentals that sound like he's trying to pull a Low-era Bowie and falling way short of the mark.

Here is what I'd rate other Nine Inch Nails albums out of 10: Pretty Hate Machine, 8. Downward Spiral, 9. The Fragile, 7. With Teeth, 4. Year Zero, 5. The Slip, 2.

Given that the album was just finished a few days ago but Mr. Reznor promised a special treat for his fans on this day two weeks ago, I think its fair to assume that he didn't give The Slip away just because it's shitty; he could have just as well made a masterpiece and given it away. But I do think that it's a bad idea for bands to start putting out their material immediately for the same reason that I don't think someone should turn in an essay for school without letting it "sit in a drawer" for two weeks... you need some time to take stock and return to your work with a fresh perspective, and that often leads to improvements. So while I totally support giving away shit for free, and I think every major millionaire band should do this*, I think they should give it a few weeks first.

In other house news, Graham, Robb and I had breakfast for dinner, and that was whacky. Big props to Graham for locating the secret bacon, which really hit the spot. Speaking of bacon, if you have never played the game Psychonauts, it is a masterpiece.

*except U2, who should stop recording music entirely and just fucking die, but they will probably give an album away to be cool but still find a way to make a shitload of money off of it by selling the iPhones that come preloaded with it or something