Fri Sept 23, KeyArena,
$35–$45,
7:30 pm, all ages.
Certain albums epitomize adolescence. My awkward years are best remembered to the sound of Nine Inch Nail's 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine, a cassette coursing with so much bitter, bilious fluid, it practically corroded the stereo—both from the amount of venomous energy it helped release and from the number of repeat listens (while I was mad at mom, dad, some boy) it encouraged. Multi-instrumentalist Trent Reznor tangled himself in an industrial briar patch of synths, drum machines, and guitars while cursing his myriad addictions with scorching intensity. For numerous moody teenagers (whose emotional clouds shifted shade from coal to midnight black), this was the soundtrack to our lives. Listening to Nine Inch Nails felt like giving a dose of arsenic to the sterile suburbs and joining with this dark punk prince in his war against the psychotic world inside the mind.
Although Reznor had nearly a decade on me, hate has no age limit, especially when it comes laced with ample amounts of pain, aggression, confusion, and volume. Pretty Hate Machine was the complete package—songs like "That's What I Get," "Something I Can Never Have," and "Terrible Lie" swelled with malevolence like giant welts, while "Head Like a Hole" planned a hostile human takeover. The songs seethed with murky vengeance, seedy sex, and a harrowing clamor, as Reznor described a descent into self-destruction that was powerful yet pleading. Hate was a cathartic listen blasting from the speakers at dance clubs—or while riding shotgun in a young co-conspirator's car, doused to the gills on piss 'n' vinegar and cheap liquor and counting the hours until we were of legal age to really cause some damage.
Over the years, Reznor hasn't exactly blunted his masochistic tendencies, even if he's slow to release them as new albums. He continues warping the face of modern rock with coarse records slathering bruising pop melodies, blasting metal beats, and harsh industrial flourishes over blunt admissions like "I want to fuck you like an animal." He's been "Hurt," Fragile, fallen in a Downward Spiral, each time re-emerging with supernatural force, trends in popular music and self-help therapy be damned. Even as both he and his fans age, "graceful" enters the picture only through gothic lullabies bookending rants, or in such beautiful stabs to the heart as "The Day the Whole World Went Away," the quick, desolate "The Frail," and And All That Could Have Been's wordless coda, "Leaving Hope."
Nine Inch Nails' latest release, With Teeth, conceals the fangs only for momentary, maudlin intros. Reznor still attacks from a fairly vicious position, ever the wounded stray. "Don't you fucking know what you are?" he screams in avenging tones on "You Know What You Are?" a dizzying flash of blastbeats, static, distortion, and breathless verbal attacks. Reznor is almost as savage a force at 40 as he was at 24, turning acrid emotions into switchblade symphonies that are as dynamic as they are demented. Here he names acute loneliness as his only friend and Teeth erects towering walls of electronics big enough to populate cities (with drumming fierce enough to nearly demolish them) as Reznor sings of feeling small inside. Even when he seems to have mellowed a little (the questioning intro of why someone else has "All the Love in the World"), there's always tension straining under the surface—ready to break through at the tail end of a chorus. Mental torture splays across these 13 songs with a force strong enough to continue propelling the band (which most recently includes Aaron North, ex–Icarus Line, on guitar) beyond the toiling introspective set and onto the Billboard charts (Teeth debuted at number one).
Teeth has been criticized for displaying Reznor's stunted growth, for revealing a man stuck with adolescent complaints unbecoming of a musician of his age and stature. But as recent interviews detailing past struggles with substance abuse and self-loathing detail, some artists never outgrow the shouting matches in their heads. Personally, even as I've (possibly) moved beyond the halfcocked rage that comes with being the frustrating combo of overzealous and underage, the beautiful brutality and jagged musical embellishments Reznor uses to meticulously decorate rock keep me locked under this madman's spell—and will do so for years to come.
