With Teeth - Nine Inch Nails

I am a slightly embarrassed to report that this was the only item I checked out when I visited the new library today. (Side note: I also looked at the latest issue of Seventeen while I was there. It was a little disappointing. I seem to remember there being more things to make fun of...? It's just one big boring drugstore ad.)

Anyway. This is my first NIN album. After I got "The Hand That Feeds" stuck in my bead because of Rock Band (shut up), I considered three things. First, I had always been a little curious about the band since Cassie mentioned them in Animorphs. (She told Rachel she would tell her mom "NIN" stood for "Nice is Neat" so she could buy their latest album. I don't know why I remember this.) Second, I had encouraged Abby to listen to Nirvana and the Pixies because he likes Nine Inch Nails; why not go the other way? Third, I haven't picked up a new band in a long time. Might as well try these guys.

One thing I have to say about With Teeth... there is no physical booklet. Instead, they have a website with lyrics and song credits available for download as a normal-sized pdf or a HUGE poster. (What are you gonna do with that, bring your USB key to Kinko's?) And of course wallpaper and videos. But whatever happened to real liner notes? They're just so... neat. And one of the main reasons why I like buying a physical album. On the other hand, cute graphs (John Mayer's Heavier Things), stickers (Beck's The Information), or pretty photographs (Band of Horses' Cease to Begin) might not be quite their style. But photos of the band, lyrics that you don't have to print, or maybe even concept art a la Kid A... but whatever. I just got it from the library anyway.

The album's style isn't far off from how I had imagined. I knew it wasn't going to be like the single. I do admit that I looked up "Industrial Rock" on Wikipedia, only to be met by a furious edit war between those who think NIN is industrial rock and those who think it is synth pop. What?? Industrial rock invokes grayscale images of the metal shells of abandoned buildings, while synth pop sounds like flowers and bunnies and hellogoodbye! Surely you can't be serious?

The truth is, With Teeth is a fairly tame album. Although I still wouldn't let my mom listen to it, it doesn't have the crazy screaming that turns me off to screamo/whatever subgenre of metal they do that in (it's only okay if it's the Pixies). (I assume this is also true for the other NIN albums?) It's dark and a little gritty, but to be honest, this album just leaves me sitting there raising an eyebrow, wondering if that's all there is. I was expecting to get my face torn off at some point. I thought it was going to be crazy. But it's almost boring. The album ends with a postindustrialmetalrocksynthpop ballad. I almost feel obligated to make a pun about the irony of the album's title.

This album isn't horrid, though. The synth loops are no more irritating than the computer fuzz on A Ghost is Born, and Trent Reznor does have a good voice. It starts off decently, with "All the Love in the World." The song begins kinda minimalistically, and it into something good, with all the energy of THTF -- plus a fun reprise with a piano. The next song, "You Know What You Are?," was one of the tracks that almost crossed the line into crazy, with favorable results. If Reznor had filled the whole album with this stuff, I might have been impressed. I can see, though, that other people might be tempted to write this track off as uninspired angst; I couldn't help but draw a negative comparison to Incubus's "Megalomaniac."

"The Collector" isn't bad, either. The creepy piano thing is kind of unconvincing, though. But yeah, not too bad.

And now we get to THTF, which is as far as I'll go through the album one track at a time. This song is catchy, and its individual components fit together quite nicely. When you're playing all the instruments, it must be hard sometimes to sound like a band.

The rest of the album is decent. I found myself enjoying Getting Smaller, but several of the tracks, like Only, were a bit underwhelming. The title track got a little close to tearing off my head, using the old "play softly for awhile and then suddenly get loud" trick, but that's kind of cheating. (It still startled me both times I listened to it -- even when I knew it was coming the second time.)

One thing about this album is that it does make me want to try other albums in the NIN discography. The deciding factor was probably Reznor's voice. I also imagine that his earlier albums are a little more edgy (and potentially more interesting).

Reading the Pitchfork review, I sigh and wish I could have written this with more knowledge of NIN's history and discography... and a booklet of lyrics I could page through.

images from here, here, and here.