Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero

For the last few days I’ve been listening to Nine Inch Nail’s new album ‘Year Zero’, suffice it to say, it kicks arse harder than a giant mechanical arse kicking machine, and there is much machine about this album. Trent Reznor can be found to be singing in a manner that I cannot say I have heard from him. He is for the most part barely singing at all, not that this is bad thing, the tone of his voice is calm, cold, ultra clipped and quite, quite terrifying no more so than in the moments when it leaps into full roar and full soar. The beats are more harsh and industrial than they’ve ever been before, they are rather Alec Empire(esque), and the ......... slight obviousness of the albums influences doesn’t end there. When I first started listening to the album I found myself thinking that this was a retread (conceptionaly speaking) of Marilyn Manson’s fine, fine album Holywood (in the valley of the shadow of death), but I quickly realized that this was a false impression, however I did find that the album’s seventh track ‘Capitol G’ has a great Marilyn Manson(esque) stomp to it which is surprising, perhaps even pleasantly so. All in all the album is a great sea change for Trent Reznor and co, with Year Zero they seem to have (with the possible exception of the first two tracks) escaped the straight jacket of the Alternative Rock spectrum that they’d placed themselves within during the course of the previous two albums The Fragile, and With Teeth, in exactly the same way that they escaped the straight jacket of Industrial music with those previous two albums, unfortunately this is in the great scheme of things nothing revolutionary, which is the most truely terrifying thing about the album and its biggest sea change.

Still four stars out of five ****.