Reznor's Side Project A Train-Wreck?

What the hell happened to Trent Reznor? One minute he was the brooding Byronic hero for the MTV generation, spreading gorgeously casual nihilism across the otherwise sterile channels of the music industry across the globe, and now he’s spewing out contrived and unimaginative crap alongside his spouse, whose name has almost completely escaped me, and some other guy that I’ve never even heard of. So much for being objective and doing my goddamn research.


The ‘train wreck’ in question is an EP which was recently released for free download on the band’s website, howtodestroyangels.com, or some crap like that, and has raised all kinds of strange questions about Reznor’s artistic credibility. The problem is that most of his fans revere him as the epitome of an anti-commercial musician, and his ingenious viral marketing and refusal to charge for his music downloads stood as a testament to that. So does the extremely generous gesture of releasing copyright free tracks onto nin.com, which fans are able to take for themselves and create their own remixes. Happy discovery. But the latest Reznor offering has only managed to engender concern amongst his closest fans and followers. Or maybe they just hate his wife, I don’t know.

How To Destroy Angels takes its name from that rather wonderful signal by that old creepy industrial band Coil, who hung around the same kind of dark dingy Gothic ruins as Boyd Rice did, and seems to attempt to pay homage to the track itself through the jarring, discordant riffs and the baying of some crazy-ass machine of groaning cogs and wires in the background- hell, I don’t know what they’d call that in the music industry. Taking a shit on a snare, or something? I don’t know.

 As someone who tries to defend the merits of industrial music in the face of a society almost crippled by its obsession with the same old god-dammed Lady GaGa hooks, I want to exalt Reznor’s EP as a grand offering of mechanical dissonant joy, but the problem is that by rights, it just doesn’t sound like industrial music. Admittedly, nor did Trent’s material as Nine Inch Nails, but his own leathery voice and laborious panting merged with the clanks and whirrs and screams of his music rather brilliantly. The same just doesn’t happen in How to Destroy Angels. Except the opening track. Wait a second, where the hell am I going with this...

The bottom line is that Trent’s churned out something of a howler this time round, and although it’s by no mean the finished product, the quality of the EP itself has cast some doubt over the minds of most industrial fans, mainly because the female vocals make the whole fucking EP sound like some kind of Blondie/NON cross-over. That should be pretty cool, but it How to Destroy Angels is anything to by, it’s not. Nevertheless, if you really want to, you can download the EP here.