I had a recent run in with a record from my youth that I hadn’t listened to in several years. There was enough Nine Inch Nails activity happening of late that I decided to give The Downward Spiral a listen again.
Back in my teen years, before I knew anything about anything about music and life in general, I drilled that record into my head to the point of burn out. As a kid that grew up without MTV, it was difficult for me to track down music and somehow I landed on The Downward Spiral and it stuck. I more than likely came across Nine Inch Nails through my sister and what Trent Reznor was doing at the time sounded new and different compared to anything else I had encountered before that.
Over time, I lost interest in the music because it felt like it wasn’t for me or I just wasn’t getting the new music. I don’t know if it was because my musical palette was expanding or what but the only thing that still grabbed me was the Broken EP. I can say that it was partially because I went off the punk rock deep end and never looked back.
I really couldn’t get into their live show the few times that I saw Nine Inch Nails. The band entered that phase of reworking the songs so I couldn’t figure out what was being played until the vocals kicked in. I can completely understand reinterpreting songs to prevent boredom and to keep progressing as an artist but it felt like it was going over my head. I checked out for a while to the point where I pretty much forgot about the band.
When Nine Inch Nails showed up as the musical guest on one of the new Twin Peaks episodes I decided to dip my toe back in to see what the band was doing. The song they played on the show sounded like an actual song instead of a meandering synthesizer soundscape so they had my attention. This was also around the time that Nine Inch Nails was releasing a series of EPs or something along those lines so I ponied up my five or six dollars and downloaded the most recent one. Sadly, I was not impressed.
I threw on The Downward Spiral to see how it would sound after all these years but it felt like it didn’t hold up for me. I don’t know if it was left over from my teenage burn out from having listened to that record so many times or if there was something else about the record that wasn’t sitting right. And to be fair, I was listening to a lot of Suicide and Alan Vega records at the time. Vega’s final album, IT, was a new benchmark and sounded like the brass ring that Trent Reznor was always reaching for and coming up just short. Add to that my fascination with the weirdness of Boris, it felt like I may have outgrown what he was creating through no fault of his own.
I still considered myself a fan of Trent Reznor because he was able to carve out a place for himself in the world of film composing and I really liked his approach to it. He figured out the subtleties of the task at hand and was still able to leave his signature on it without being overbearing about it.
What got me recently was the Nine Inch Nails tribute record that Allie Goertz put out called Peeled Back. The record was a series of stripped down covers that spanned the band’s catalog and was really well done. The deconstruction of the songs helped renew my interest so I gave The Downward Spiral another listen and I was able to hear it differently.
That’s one of my favorite things about music. Time and circumstance can change the perspective of the listener and the way a record lands on the ears. That’s why I always have a tendency to go back and relisten to certain bands or records instead of writing them off completely. Music is a personal journey and there is a certain amount of push and pull involved, if the listener is active and trying to find something more than entertainment to occupy the silence. I wouldn’t say that I’m back into Nine Inch Nails completely but I am having a good time going back through the old records and getting caught up on the ones that I missed over the years.
Nine Inch Nails did announce a tour recently that was obviously going to skip Pittsburgh because it’s rare for a worthwhile tour of that size to actually land here. The closest show is at the basketball arena in Cleveland so I thought about getting tickets and heading north for a minute. That is until, in typical fashion for this day and age, people were complaining about exorbitant ticket prices and immediate sellouts so I decided to spare myself the frustration of trying to figure out how to sign into the TicketBastard application.
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