Nine inch nails the downward spiral6/21/2023 ![]() In Closer, for instance, the protagonist finds an ephemeral shelter for his own messed-up ego in brutal and dehumanized sex acts: “I wanna fuck you like an animal/ I wanna feel you from the inside/My whole existence is flawed/You get me closer to God. There is plenty of biblical and religious imagery and metaphors throughout the whole project. The tone of the record shifts between violent atheism and dark existential shades. The first 6 tracks of the album show the angry and witty nihilistic sides of the protagonist (the acknowledging in Heresy of the fact that “God is Dead/And no one cares/If There is a hell/ I’ll meet you there”). Stylistically the project follows the narration conveyed by the expressionist lyrics. As the title suggests, the record is a concept album about the fall of a man in a nihilistic spiral of depression leading to a never-ending void. What I did know is how I felt about myself, and my struggles to figure out who and what and why from my own perspective.” And therein lies the album’s healing irony: In facing the abyss, Reznor found his congregation.In 1994 Trent Reznor emerged again from his abyss of drug addiction and depression to give his wicked machine-like musical project Nine Inch Nails a second child: The Downward Spiral. The last song Nine Inch Nails recorded for The Downward Spiral was Hurt. RT bluemodulo: Apropos of nothing, here’s David Bowie covering A Warm Place off of the 1994 Nine Inch Nails masterpiece The Downward Spiral in a Japanese. “What do I have to say? I didn’t live this exotic life. “I was feeling my way around,” Reznor told Zane Lowe of the period leading up to Spiral. After Spiral, artists didn’t have to decide whether to be a rock band or an electronic producer-Reznor had bridged the two. Wallpaper: The Downward Spiral 1 (Standard) by Nine Inch Nails 22 5 Wallpaper: The Downward Spiral 7 (Standard) by Nine Inch Nails 15 6. If the album has an essentializing moment, it’s the climax of “Closer”: mechanistic synth-funk that gives way to a warped, solitary piano, part music box, part trash. Wallpaper: The Downward Spiral 9 (Standard) by Nine Inch Nails 10 Wallpaper: The Downward Spiral 6 (Standard) by Nine Inch Nails 16 3. Even now, it feels damaged, noisy, wrong-the product of both a gleaming future and an already ruined past. Mixing digital and analog, sample collages with live performances, densely processed signals with naturalistic ones, Spiral was a drastic renovation to the texture and feel of conventional rock. Here, the CD side contains a digitally remastered version of the album, while the DVD side has a 5. That you could whistle along with half of it was perverse but strangely fitting, especially given Reznor’s S&M affectations: Here was pain that felt pretty good. Nine Inch Nails 1994 masterwork The Downward Spiral makes a good choice for an early issue in the 'dual-disc' format that puts CD material on one side of a disc and DVD content on the other. What emerged was a pattern of emotional whiplash: You feel like you can topple the world, shred your tormentors, vent your toxic depths. Even tracks that found continuity with the band’s earlier music-“Big Man with a Gun,” the stuttering hardcore of “March of the Pigs”-were drastically more aggressive than anything they’d done before, flashes of mania that made the album’s quieter moments feel all the more exhausted. Inspired by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy ( Low in particular), Spiral pushed the industrial pop of Pretty Hate Machine and the Broken EP in unexpected directions, experimenting with torch songs (“Piggy”), disco and soul (“Closer”), and ballads of such unnerving fragility that listening to them feels voyeuristic (“Hurt”). (Reznor himself remains somewhat incredulous-a note on the band’s own website describes the album as a “celebration of self-destruction in the form of a concept record that somehow managed to become a multi-platinum worldwide hit.”) “I had to do it.”Įven in a shifted mid-’90s paradigm where bands like Nirvana could become famous, Spiral felt extreme-a blast of negativity so thorough that it’s hard to imagine it making headway with any size of audience, let alone the four million or so who ended up buying it. “Sorry,” Reznor remembered saying in a 2016 interview with Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. It sold quadruple platinum and made Reznor an uneasy megastar, but plunged him into years of self-loathing and self-destruction. When Trent Reznor submitted The Downward Spiral to Interscope Records cofounder Jimmy Iovine, he offered an apology. The Downward Spiral album, which featured two of Reznors best known songs 'Closer' and 'Hurt' was an enormous success. Inspired by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy (Low in particular), Spiral pushed the industrial pop of Pretty Hate Machine and the Broken EP in unexpected directions, experimenting with torch songs (Piggy), disco and soul (Closer), and ballads of such unnerving fragility that listening to them feels voyeuristic.
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