Things Falling Apart - Nine Inch Nails

Nine Inch Nails, the band who brought tunes to industrial music make a slight return after the stunning double album ‘The Fragile’ with an album mainly consisting of reworked songs from The Fragile. The music is the normal varied Nine Inch Nails mix of thumping beats, haunting piano, anger filled lyrics, harsh thrashy guitar and pounding synths. The question is though, is it as good as ‘Further Down the Spiral’, the excellent ...
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Starting off with ‘Slipping Away’ the album gets off to a good start. Slipping Away transforms the second track from The Fragile:Right, ‘Into the Void’ into a fairly relaxed (By NIN standards anyway) into what is mainly a sweeping masterpiece of a track before blasting out into something closer to the original. An excellent version done by a couple of NIN members.

Moving onto ‘The Great Collapse’, ... more

Nine Inch Nails, the band who brought tunes to industrial music make a slight return after the stunning double album ‘The Fragile’ with an album mainly consisting of reworked songs from The Fragile. The music is the normal varied Nine Inch Nails mix of thumping beats, haunting piano, anger filled lyrics, harsh thrashy guitar and pounding synths. The question is though, is it as good as ‘Further Down the Spiral’, the excellent versions album for the equally excellent ‘The Downward Spiral’

Starting off with ‘Slipping Away’ the album gets off to a good start. Slipping Away transforms the second track from The Fragile:Right, ‘Into the Void’ into a fairly relaxed (By NIN standards anyway) into what is mainly a sweeping masterpiece of a track before blasting out into something closer to the original. An excellent version done by a couple of NIN members.

Moving onto ‘The Great Collapse’, the only really new track on the album we get a track that slowly builds up from a piano into yet another sweeping masterpiece. But then, oddly, at the end of the track it seems to slip into something that sounds like another NIN track.

Next is a reworking of ‘The Wretched’ uniquely titled, ‘The Wretched (Version)’. It’s very stripped down compared to the original and looses something for that thought the contrast between the very stripped down and less stripped sections is interesting.

Sod the next track, I just don’t like it. It’s the first of THREE remixes of Star******s and they’re all dire. If you like dance music you may like them, but I don’t – sorry!

Next track worth worrying about is ‘The Frail (Version)’. I really like this, if you’re at all familiar with Apocoliptica (I think I spelt that right) then I can describe this really easily for you. Just imagine them doing The Frail and add a handful of strange noises and then chop the whole thing up to give it an eerie sense of flow. The lack of flow may lead people who haven’t heard the original not liking it but I think it’s a really good version of the song.

Here’s the second version of Star******s… and there it goes.

Following on is ‘Where is Everybody (Version)’ which starts off very promisingly with what can only be described as Nine Inch Nails doing a light night vibe. Haunting synths and Trent Reznor’s vocals put through a nightmare vocoder on a caffeine trip make for good, if somewhat disturbing, late night listening. The huge fuzz bass is somewhat out of place though and spoils the beginning of the song a touch. But the random transformation into drum and bass at around four minutes in is just bad and I always skip the track at that point.

Now we get to the confusing part, A remix of a version of a cover. Got that? This is a remix (By NIN members) of a cover they recorded of the Gary Numan song Metal. The song certainly benefits from the NIN makeover, it makes the original sound quite weak in comparison. But just to add to the confusion, there’s a version of this song floating round called “Lee Completion Mix”. This in turn makes the remix of the version of the cover sound a bit weak but is apparently not an official remix. Shame really, it’s good.

10 Miles High is next and is another track that builds, thought thankfully NOT into drum and bass, into a stomping, um, well, chorus I suppose would be the best word for it, before falling down again for a quiet bit and then rising up again for a stomping finally, finishing the album on a positive note.

Actually, that’s not the end of the album – the final version of Star******s is last but I never make it that far!
 

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