It's the time to say something about the new album of Nine inch nails, that is running 24h a day in my stereo from the day it came out. It's a great work, and you can say it from the first time you listen to it - differently from With Teeth. It's totally direct. Reznor has found again a pure anger: but this time it has targets - it's not the existential anger of the past, the one without aims. It's a deep look through the actual society (symbolised by the american one), with his danger mouvement toward the end of civil liberties. He imagines an utopistic development of our world - a time in wich freedom will be only a far souvenir. But it's not a fantasy, or a nightmare: what Reznor wants, if we also consider the little world that he has created around this album (from the many websites to the "Art Is Resistance" subversive group), is that we try to ask to ourselves where are we going, and what is really hidden under the "Maya's veil" of the political theatre and the "beautiful" face of the social values in wich we live. What we will see, he says, it won't be so beautiful.... At least, is it real utopy, or is it something closer?
A political album, so. And the right way to speak loud this message is a direct musical approach. The main merit of this album is that it mixes this aspect with a huge experimentivity, mainly on the sound, that becomes highly synthetic and over-saturate. The noise of this album has his aim in itself. Every istruments, from the drum to the guitar, sometimes the voice, is what it would result from a Pro-Tools session in a N.A.S.A. computer that's going crazy. In this album there are solos of pure noise. There are schizofrenic guitar riffs, so saturate that they their sound leaning toward a digital stain. Reznor was never so "out" of himself like in this last work. Everything is really aesthetically impersonal. The way he sings, his hiccupped, fragmented voice, is a news that confirm this "robotic" approach. The only flash of "human" life, maybe, is in the masterpiece "In this Twilight", probably the the best song of the album. Other vertexs are "The Beginning of the End", "The good Soldier", "God Given", and "The Greater Good", this last an instrumental track that justify, alone, the purchase of Year Zero.
It's the most electronic album of Nine inch nails (only the first two songs are rock-oriented), and now it's interesting to see how he will re-arrange everything for the live.
I stop here this little remarks, and I conclude quoting Claudio Fabretti in his good review on the "Ondarock" website: Reznor, with this work, has demostrated that he has nothing to demonstrate.