Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero

[Ryth]

Year Zero wasn't bad, it was certainly a step-up from With Teeth, but it didn't really do that much for me. The Fragile will always be NIN Album Numero Uno in my book.

[Sephex]

Yeah, I listened to it a bunch yesterday, and wrote a review on it for my school newspaper, haha. It's so easy to just listen to the whole entire thing. It's a lot harder for me to do that with past CDs.

Also, I thought it was really cool that a lot of what you said about the songs was true. Although...maybe it's just me, but the last song sounds oddly like Phil Collins. Besides that, though, I'm so impressed with this. Funkalicious. ;D Addicting.

Well, I am glad that I was able to be able to describe the songs somewhat accurately. I agree that this album is very easy to listen to all the way through. The tracks are in perfect order and flow very well together.

I can see what you mean by Phil Collins, though. The drums do have that air about them.

[Nominus Experse]

Listened to it three times today.

In comparison to how I enjoyed other albums, it's better than With Teeth, but still very far behind that of The Downward Spiral.

It had its wondrous moments, and I felt like NIN might come back and pull me in, but such a feeling was sadly short lived and far and few between the tracks.

I want bands to evolve, to search and scope out new sounds, but not at the expense of quality or signature tonal patterns / subjects / raw feeling. There are a few instances in Year Zero that pull from works that I absolutely adore, but they didn't last long.

Realize that what I say isn't due to an elitist outlook. Rather, it's simply due to me remembering what Trent once produced - something raw, gritty, and oddly searingly cold. It's just that in his recent work, he hasn't produced work of the same calibur. It fails to pull me in - to captivate me, to essentially force me see and hear what it is the song is about.

This is not to say that I thought the whole album was . But then again, I don't feel like one ought to sift through an album for the few moments to where it truly shines. Even with The Fragile, there was more substantial songs than filler, but anything past that has failed to produce much more than what I would consider "filler".


Am I heartbroken? Irked? Frustrated? No, not really. A little annoyed in some ways, but artists ought to make what drives them, not what their fan-base demands. And Trent has said exactly that.

If he is appealing to a different fan-base than those of whom he began with, than why ought I care? I'll simply listen to his older tracks with a somewhat nostalgic, slightly saddened attitude when speaking of Trent's newer works.

And then I'll take a hit and spin once again into Pretty Hate Machine.