![]() ![]() If summer’s sunshine clashes with whatever inner turmoil you feel, put on the album and the world will appear to darken appropriately. It is enveloping and relentless: satisfyingly terse, built with an ear for energizing rhythm, and as adventuresome as anything Reznor has done. Now arrives the culmination, Bad Witch, whose six songs Reznor labels-for practical more than artistic reasons-an album rather than an EP. The closing track built and then dissolved into a static-y loop over 11 minutes. For 2017’s Add Violence, the mix was cleaner, and bright keyboard sounds reemerged. Its lead single, “Burning Bright (Field on Fire),” came off like Led Zeppelin playing through a megaphone on a blazing oil derrick. Reznor has always also been a pop craftsman, yet 2016’s Not the Actual Events EP-the one that made a mess in my kitchen-buried its melodies deep. He’d go on to make grand opuses, but the guerilla spirit of Broken, all these years later, animates Reznor’s latest triumph: a trilogy of short-form records released at the rate of one a year, loosely inspired by political-cultural feelings of alienation. One accompanying music video depicted a man putting his genitals into a meat grinder.Ĭan Protest Art Get Its Mojo Back? Spencer Kornhaber A sorcerer of studio production, Reznor made chainsaw-like guitars somehow gleam pleasurably, screamed fang-sharp hooks, and engineered horror-movie jump scares by switching between silence and noise. ![]() His 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine, paired chintzy synth-pop symphonies with shockingly abject self-loathing, but his true breakthrough of confrontation came with 1992’s Broken, one of the best EPs in rock history. Which is saying something, given that this is the guy whose defining hit lobbed the phrase I want to fuck you like an animal into karaoke bars. Three decades into making anguished, seductive industrial rock, Trent Reznor had entered his least-compromising phase yet. This was how Nine Inch Nails delivered the band’s then-new album: as something that might stain you. It gunked my fingers, and it to this day contaminates the file drawer where I’ve kept the envelope. In December 2016, I opened an envelope that arrived in the mail, and a fine black dust-like magnet shavings, or gunpowder, or ground-up malice-poured out onto my countertop. ![]()
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