Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails
Written by Mark Osborne
Published on 04/17/2007
Originally from Binary Culture / [the-lowdown.net]
http://www.binaryculture.net

It’s four forty six in the morning. I’m angry, I’m tired, I haven’t changed my clothes, gone to bed, showered, or shaved. I just finished posting the most vitriolic, outraged column of my career so far. But I’m still sitting here rooted to my seat. Why? Because today is Tuesday, April 17, 2007 and I just told i-Tunes to check the music store for songs I’ve purchased. Two seconds of fervent finger crossing later and the hotly anticipated new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, is streaming straight from Steve Jobs’ mothership to my ears.

After what happened earlier today (it’s not tomorrow until I’ve gone to bed, dammit) in Virginia, the first single (Survivalism) is feeling incredibly vital and prescient in the worst way, since it’s a savage and sardonic look at what Trent Reznor thinks of when he looks at the American flag these days, or so I’d imagine. It’s not hard to imagine what must be playing on the cable news networks right now, loops of helicopter shot footage of bloodied and/or frightened college students being lead by police away from the carnage, and it’s not hard to imagine it playing out on a screen behind Trent as he sarcastically boasts that he’s got his “violence in hi-def ultra realism.”

I’m not sure if this confluence of events is auspicious or inauspicious. Surely it’s never preferable to release an album in the wake of a continent shaking tragedy, but it also seems like the sort of unrelenting examination of the collective consiousness of North America at the heart of Year Zero is the sort of thing we’ll need to counter the impending tsunami of media sensationalism and pre-packaged hand wringing.

What immediately sets Year Zero apart from the rest of the Nine Inch Nails canon is that the strange new side to Trent that began to surface on With Teeth roars to life on the new album. Up until With Teeth, and even across the majority of the album, Trent has mostly been occupied with emotional currents and basic human experiences whether it’s a general sense of longing, the unabashed channeling of the id, or the shame of addiction. With The Hand that Feeds and the inter-album single Non Entity, Trent dove into the specific political realities of the now, something he only ever hinted at in such fare as the Bowie duet I’m Afraid of Americans.

But true to form, both singles retained more poetry than your typical post-Clinton politipop, thus floating above the majority of it to claim a place as some of my favorite music for getting my politirage on.

Year Zero is at once a very similar animal and its own species entirely. Trent’s political thoughts are never far from the forefront, but he wisely communicates them through the cultivation of a specific atmosphere and descriptive language that gives you all the proper nouns you could possibly need without actually saying a single one of them, because after all what’s the point in saying “Fuck Bush,” if you can construct a soundscape that reflects precisely that sentiment.

What’s refreshing and fun about the lyrics of the album is that Trent steps out of being Trent and steps into being The Man. The majority of the songs are sung from the perspective of the forces at work in society that Trent sees as being detrimental whether it’s the government or the basic selfishness he sees in the quintessential (read stereotypical) contemporary American, which represents quite a departure for Nine Inch Nails, given that the vast majority of the music is either explicitly or implied to be very intimately related to Trent himself. Hurt is about his addiction, Closer is about his struggle with identity and sexuality, and so on. Year Zero is Trent channeling The Enemy.

It likely sounds bizarre, but ever since my first listening of The Fragile, I’ve looked at Trent Reznor as being more of a painter than a musician. My justification lies in the fact that it feels like with every album he produces, he uses a very specific “palette” of loops, samples, chords, and even drum beats. It might have something to do with the fact that he seems to use the various instruments at his disposal more like paint brushes since he does it all on his own and pieces it together separately in the studio, or I could just be inept at musical terminology. The point is that every album has its own distinct sound and continuity that clearly separates it from the others.

There’s a decent amount of residual material from With Teeth floating around early on in Year Zero, which is to be expected given the practically lightening fast turn around (when taking the previous gaps between albums into account), but Year Zero stands comfortably on it’s own two feet, with a distinctive “palette” all of it’s own. By comparison, Year Zero is surprisingly electronica centered given that With Teeth seemed to herald a new direction pointed straight at the rock side of things.

I would venture to say that Year Zero is far and away Nine Inch Nails’ most “capital I” Industrial album to date, finding itself much closer in tone, structure, and design to Skinny Puppy’s Mythmaker than With Teeth, but without sacrificing any of the core elements of Nine Inch Nails’ sound.

The early stand out track is easily the throbbing, stompy “Vessel,” which seems to be the perfect marriage of Skinny Puppy level industrial bombast and Trent’s classic wordplay until he steps back to let the seething instrumentals carry the listener away. It’s destined to be an epic touring song that will lull crowds into an ecstatic trance.

You’d have to be insane not to notice the underlying sexuality in all of Nine Inch Nails’ albums, even ignoring the lyrics, but there’s only one real way to sum up Year Zero as an experience. It’s great, dirty sex under a strobe light. Welcome to the new zeitgeist, welcome to Year Zero.