I was listening to An omen_, the just-released EP from Trent Reznor’s How to destroy angels_, and it made me feel a little warm inside. Odd, considering I was sitting in a frigid office building, listening to a song called “Ice Age.” Such is the power of nostalgia — Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails made a massive impact on me at an early age, and the music that defines you has the power to give you a snifter-full-of-brandy feeling. And then I wondered, where did that feeling come from: the music or the man? How to destroy angels_ does not sound much like Nine Inch Nails. Then again, what does? (More on this later.) Still, underneath the vocals and instrumentation, there is a texture to Reznor’s work that is his signature, and like too much of that brandy, it is both deeply intoxicating and a bit dangerous.
Rewind 20 years: In 1992, Reznor was, in his own words, “26 years, on my way to hell,” and his then-newest music, the Broken EP, sounded like the mouth of damnation itself. Noisy and abrasive, full of glitch sounds (not a Reznor innovation, though Broken was probably the first commercially successful album to use them), the EP took a huge step away from the frigid synth-pop found on NIN’s 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine.
That 1992 EP is in almost every way the inverse of An omen__, from the fiery red cover art to the rapid rhythms and heavy metal guitars that compose the EP’s signature songs, “Wish” and “Gave Up.” By contrast, the aforementioned “Ice Age,” moves at a languid pace and serenades with acoustic instruments and folk twang. How the hell did we get here?
Obviously, Reznor has accomplished more in the last 20 years than most musicians would manage over the course of three or four lifetimes. He took Nine Inch Nails from a band that could not perform live to an arena draw, and in so doing put on some of the most elaborate stage shows in modern rock. Offstage, Reznor embraced file sharing and remix culture in unprecedented ways — Radiohead received the acclaim for releasing a major album for free, but Reznor did it with more conviction (In Rainbows had major-label backing as a pay-what-you-want release; The Slip was independent and exclusively free). Reznor’s soundtrack for The Social Network is the first primarily electronic score to win an Oscar. His improbable metamorphosis from strung-out dance-club gadfly wrapped in VHS tape to tuxedo-clad and happily married Academy Award-winning composer could be the subject of its own Oscar-bait biopic (directed by Reznor accomplice David Fincher, naturally).
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