All great musicians deserve some time out from their brilliance. They
also 'deserve' a dud in their careers (granted it comes on the back of a
hit). It's from mistakes and failures, lessons are learned. And believe
it or not, even the great Trent Reznor, can err. His 2007 concept
album, Year Zero, failed to reach the same heights as The Downward Spiral and The Fragile - albums which helped secure his fame. Year Zero
It was a lacklustre muddle through what seemed to be an overly-packaged
techno-industrial lark, devoid of orgininality and bloated with
pretence. While I never expect musicians to refrain from exploring other
avenues in sound, I do feel such endeavours should at the very least
sign post originality. Not so with the orotund machismo offered on Year Zero.
But fans sharing my view on the mediocrity of that album and the subsequent The Slip, which slipped (forgive me for a I pun!) into obscurity, may agree Hesitation Marks
is a comeback of sorts for a man, faced with turning 50, but who seems
unaffected by age; a man who is always transmogrifying yet at the same
time keeping musical leitmotifs of the past alive in his distinctive
sound.
Since the precarious wilderness years of The Slip
Reznor's gotten married and procreated... oh, and he won an Oscar and a
Golden Globe and formed a side project with his significant other. All
this can be diluted and interpreted as a procession into his ubiquitous
success and, seeing as though he's nearing 50, perhaps a midlife crisis... gone right (?).
Gone
are the angst-stricken screams, the raging against God and hints of
bestiality. Away with the jarring grind of effects, samples and guitars
mashed into schizophrenia and heart-grinding laments, glued against
atmospheres of hazy auditory shimmers.
Reznor's demonstrated on Hesitation Marks
a new found 'angle' on music technology and (are you sitting down) a
taste for funk. Yup, I said 'Funk.' I find myself doing an awkward jig
as tracks like 'All time low', with it's Bowie-esque swagger lead you
through characteristically meticulous textures of near drum-and-bass
moments and dangerously dancey beats, which mark the record's progress
from past offerings. By the time you get to the bubbling, foreboding
bass that unsettles 'What I have done', a song which could easily lend
itself to hip-hop, you're left wondering: Is this a midlife crisis? And
by crisis I mean the good kind. Like the 'crisis' that resulted in the
self-loathing, dystopian heresy offered by The Downward Spiral,
an album which seemed to track Reznor's personal descent into substance
abuse. So, a good kind of crisis then, one which only the dark prince of
industrial music could accept and use to his advantage. Despite the
unsettlingly upbeat Everything, it's a hump in the road to what
could be a defining moment for Reznor and the future of NIN. His bleak
world view so evident in his body of work gives way to a taste for the
funk. He's still a little angry, though, as he screams "Thrive/Just
become/Your disease" on 'In two', which at first reminds you of the
texturalexploration The Spiral. But then a Bowie moments returns jolting you back. Reznor sounds confident and seems hungry again.
