Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero
Fans Rewarded With New Album by Trent Reznor's Industrial band, NIN
A dark and cautionary tale about the world at war, Year Zero follows the group's 2005 effort, With Teeth.
Nine Inch Nails fans are a hardy lot. They have had to wait up to six years between albums from the enigmatic Trent Reznor. The long wait between albums has weeded out the less-than-devoted from Reznor's following. What remains is a core group of militant devotees. That group has been rewarded in the last three years by the virtual landslide of new material from the usually nitpicky, perfectionist Reznor: 2005's With Teeth, the Beside You In Time concert DVD in February of 2007 and Year Zero, out this month (April, 2007).
Reznor has always stayed true to his vision. He has always sounded like no one else, from the 1989 ahead-of-its-time Industrial dance record Pretty Hate Machine and the steamrolling crunch of 1992's EP Broken, to the organic, devastating tale of destruction of The Downward Spiral in 1994. Five years later he emerges with The Fragile, a two-disc epic filled with ambient sound, intensely personal lyrics and anguished vocals . Six long years later, and his fans were finally rewarded with the techno-political With Teeth and now, the aforementioned and foreboding Year Zero.
Year Zero is With Teeth's cynical underbelly. It is a cautionary fable of what can happen to the world if humanity stays on its current path. It is a snapshot of a world at war, sharply divided by economic lines and polluted to the point of no return. The story is told with stark language. In "Capital G," Reznor, who is notoriously anti-Bush, says, "I pushed the button and elected him to office and he pushed a button and dropped a bomb."
The sound of Year Zero mixes sonic guitars, fractured violins and trumpets, heavy bass lines, thudding drums provided by Josh Freese, tinkling pianos and the beeps, blips and static of the digital age.
In anyone else's hands, that impersonal backdrop might have resulted in noise over substance. But in Reznor's hands, the hard, metallic sounds of the album became profoundly personal and deeply poetic.
The mechanical sound was created by Reznor while on tour promoting With Teeth. It is only fitting that an album that speaks of the "ones and zeros" of binary code (and even has them printed on the actual CD) was created solely on Reznor's laptop computer while out on the road. Even Reznor, who has been sober for five years, was amazed at how quickly he created Year Zero.
"Is it possible I am actually finished writing and recording a new Nine Inch Nails record? Apparently so. We begin mixing in January! Juggling fifteen all-new tracks around. Testing sequences. No leftovers from "With Teeth". Highly conceptual. Quite noisy. F*ing cool," Reznor wrote on his website, www.nin.com, in December.
The songs on Year Zero flow into each other and form a frightening big picture, but each stands well on its own. Poet-musician Saul Williams provided background vocals and longtime collaborators Atticus Ross, Rob Sheridan and Alan Moulder helped produce and engineer the 16-song disc.
Year Zero is what a concept album is supposed to be. Each song provides a piece of the total picture of a damaged world. In true Nine Inch Nails fashion, the album ends with as close to a ballad as Reznor can manage. In "Zero-Sum" he sings: "Shame on us. We knew from the start. May god have mercy on our dirty little hearts. Shame on us for all we have done. And all we ever were. Just zeros and ones."
No one else could have written a more beautiful and melodic warning to the human race. Not just that song, but the entire album.
