Nine Inch Nails: Reset to 'Year Zero'
There's a misconception afoot about "Year Zero," the latest project from musical puppet master Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails. Launched in February with a cryptic message on a tour T-shirt, fleshed out in dozens of websites, scary voicemail messages, Morse code blips, murals, fliers and other real-world propaganda, "Year Zero" reaches a peak (but not its conclusion) with today's album release. There's never been such an extensive or well-planned campaign involving a major pop release. But "Year Zero" represents something more than just killer marketing.
Reznor has been complaining that the alternate reality game, or ARG, set in motion before the album's release has been portrayed as separate and subservient to the album. He's right. "Year Zero" isn't just a cyberpunk "Dark Side of the Moon" augmented by a few impressive Web-based extras. Nor is it merely a game, the latest take on Quake with an amazing soundtrack. (Reznor did, incidentally, write the music and effects for that bestselling shooter game.)
"Year Zero" is a total marriage of the pop and gamer aesthetics that unlocks the rusty cages of the music industry and solves some key problems facing rock music as its cultural dominance dissolves into dust.
It's easy for even Reznor appreciators to overlook this accomplishment, because "Year Zero" also works as pure pop. Composed mostly on a laptop and inspired by the Situationist hip-hop of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad production team, its 16 tracks reinvigorate Reznor's most effective sonic tricks: surface noise, extreme dynamic shifts, dinosaur riffing and the slashes of prettiness that drive light into the hard stuff.
Reznor's been picking at these elements forever, rearranging them, exploring their inner structures, breaking them apart.
He's been criticized for being insular, but think of Reznor as Tolkien, not Timbaland, and the repetitions make sense. He's building a world, and that world needs its own language, and language establishes itself through trial and error.
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In his own universe
After the grim, hit-hungry perfectionism of the group's previous album, 2005's "With Teeth," it's great to hear Reznor sprawl out in his own universe again.
But to stop at the music is to miss what "Year Zero" accomplishes as a larger, ongoing work. In fact, it may be a mistake to even start with the music. Hard-core NIN fans and online game enthusiasts have been adding up the ARG's clues to uncover its "X-Files"-like narrative, a compelling vision of a near-future afflicted by multiple calamities.
