Album of the Week: Year Zero

Back in high school all the cool hipsters with a dark attitude fell in love with Trent Reznor and dark olive green t-shirts with thick brown spirals and concert dates were spotted through out the hallways.
What was the fuss with this guy?
So I picked up The Downward Spiral, an album people back then called 'operatic' and an "epic tragedy" with such revered hushed tones. It sounded like a concept album with a path destined to be something akin to The Wall.

Popping the disc in, my ears were assaulted and molested, and after a few spins this album found its way to the bottom of my cd pile. Eyeing it now and again, as I cleaned my room, a shame haunted me.
Was it the music?
Was it the money I spent on something I hated?
Was it wanting to be apart of something, I clearly wasn't into?
Was my taste too conventional, to vanilla to appreciate something this intense?

In an effort to exorcise these thoughts I found a friend who gleefully took the album from me with a bemused look, but found himself too excited to criticize my guilt filled generosity.

I've gone on to hate many more albums, but songs involving metaphorical pigs still make me a little uncomfortable and hearing Johnny Cash sing Closer, is like the boogie-man taunting me while pulling me in. Seeing the up and down career track of Trent Reznor provided me with the chance to ease myself and chalk NIN as a lot of hype and gritting teeth.


It took me by surprise how thrilling the dark Orwellian noise of NIN's latest concept album Year Zero. The concept album has always felt like an overly pretentious term for what amounts in many cases to being a thematic umbrella, which few artists dare to tread and even fewer thrive. Year Zero takes a dystopian look at the near future and gets all meta on our asses. The music creates a tone for what Reznor described as something "that blurred the lines of what was fiction and what wasn't. The record turned out to be more than a just a record in scale, as you will see over time."
That isn't so much an ominous sociological claim, as much as Renzor might like, but a part of the conceptual marketing strategy which has added layers upon layers to this work. Extra tracks have been found on flash drives in bathroom stalls at NIN concerts and Reznor has used multimedia outlets to really create a participatory soundscape that feels like the soundtrack to our own distruction or at least a good background track to a Chuck Palahniuk novel.
The improvised feel to the music, adds to its immediacy. The album doesn't hit you over the head the way The Downward Spiral does. Year Zero, while at times chaotic, is more restrained, but no less powerful.