Nine Inch Nails
Year Zero
5
out of 10
Apocalypse wow?
Trent Reznor
thinks we’re all doomed, shame his album won’t save us
If you thought the new series of 24
was bleak; welcome to 2023. Los Angeles has been devastated by a spate of dirty
bombs that began at the Oscars and obliterated Hollywood. The government have
added a chemical to the water supply under the cloak of counter bio-terrorism,
but it’s created a dopamine-deficient populace of unquestioning drones who
can’t get it up. Books are banned and the free world is policed by an
evangelical Christian army of airborne stormtroopers. Oh, and oil’s running
out.
This is where industrogoth archduke Trent Reznor reckons we’ll be in 16 years
without a total u-turn in our geo-political approach to everything. In the
absence of that, he’s made another Nine Inch Nails record. Oh well, it’s a
start. Less an album than the culmination of a complicated game of cat and
mouse played out over the internet between Reznor and his fans (with NIN
creating fake websites and leaving clues as to the album’s dark vision over the
course of several months), ‘Year Zero’ is, in Reznor’s words, “the soundtrack
to a movie that doesn’t exist”. It brings together the voices of different
characters from this fictional dystopia, as the world approaches its final
end-game. Trouble is, they all sound like ambient-period Nine Inch Nails songs
from ‘The Fragile’, and this means lots of silver and grey ambience, but not
many tunes. OK, there’s about three: ‘Survivalism’, ‘Capital G’ and ‘God
Given’. But what’s strange is that the brilliantly visceral live band that
Reznor assembled to tour last collection ‘With Teeth’ are barely used here.
There’s sod all guitar on this record. Apparently, part two of the saga, due
next year, is full of hoary rock songs, but this is just one long squelchy fart
of a soundscape that Reznor himself admits is probably too long. It’s certainly
too unremitting. Ah well; there won’t be much need for choruses when the first
bomb hits.
Dan Martin
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