"Year Zero" - Nine Inch Nails - Album Review

**** out of *****

Sometime in the fall of 2006 an Interscope Records exec got a phone call from Trent Reznor (the brains behind Nine Inch Nails) that probably went something like this:

“I’m working on a new record.”
“Okay Trent, talk to you in five years. Take care!”

Like so many of the more impressive musicians in the past twenty years or so, Nine Inch Nails is notorious for long gestation periods between records. Beginning with The Downward Spiral in 1994, Reznor has averaged almost six years per album. His last piece, With Teeth, came out in 2005 so it was reasonable for fans to expect his next one sometime after the end of this decade. Year Zero took a little over a year to make and its proof positive that time doesn’t always equal perfection.

This is easily Reznor’s best work since The Downward Spiral and ironically it’s his least personal. The record is a concept piece that tells the story of a fallen United States, sometime after 2020. It’s clear that, like so many others, he’s nervous about the course the country has taken over the last several years. He unleashes all of his frustrations throughout the course of Year Zero, taking on everything from global warming to chronic apathy with unrelenting vigor and passion.

The themes are similar to his previous work but the difference here lies in the point of view. Reznor has always fueled his lyrics with angst driven by fear. In the world according to Trent, everything doesn’t just suck, its balls out terrifying. But here he takes on different personas, those of people both caught up in a war they don’t understand but needing desperately to believe in something.

“The Good Soldier” tells of a member of an unnamed army, remembering what his life was like and what he now wants it to be. The chorus is simple with Reznor in his haunting trademark whisper forcing out the words “I am trying to believe” over and over again. “Capital G” is the probably the best indictment of the Bush Administration yet. It describes in detail the leader who has taken over Reznor’s distraught new world from the view of an ordinary citizen. With lines like “Trading in my god for this one/And he signs his name with a capital G”, it’s sarcastic, brutal and ingeniously layered with a Gestapo chant hiding just underneath the wailing riffs and bass lines.

The music isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, especially for a Nine Inch Nails album, however it moves with the same brash confidence found on Pretty Hate Machine and Downward Spiral. The beats are strong, the guitars are loud and the industrial edge is crunching and abrasive. Reznor again seems as though the melodies are coming to him rather then the other way around. He piles layer upon layer of sonic destruction underneath his vocals, which are as gut-wrenching as they’ve ever been, capping it all of with “Zero Sum”, another heartbreaking coda in the vein of “Hurt”. It’s not quite that impressive but it’s so close it makes the skin crawl.

The marketing scheme surrounding this record has become the stuff of legend. The packaging is magnificent. There’s an online game that further expands the universe created by the album. Supposedly there’s a movie in the works and Reznor swears he’s got ideas for at least one, maybe two, sequel records. As fascinating as it all seems, it would be meaningless if this album didn’t work. Fortunately it doesn’t just work, it soars, proving that Nine Inch Nails can still crank out important industrial rock better then anybody and he doesn’t need a short millennium to do it.

Keepers: “The Good Soldier”, “Capital G”, “The Great Destroyer”, “Zero Sum”


Links:

The Album's Offiicial Site

The Beginning of the Year Zero Webgame (Hint: Click and drag your mouse across the page like you're dragging and dropping a file. You'll see!)

And speaking of chronic apathy...SOMEONE MAKE HER GO AWAY!!!!!


That's it for today. See you tomorrow!