[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Torn Curtain

Black Sabbath - 13

It's pretty good.

It actually is!! Really, just sounds like a better version of the sound from that Iommi Hughes record from ten years ago, BUT, even that and this sounded sooooooo much better than that shit Tony was playing in the 80s!!

Ozzy sounds good, the lyrics aren't bad. However, why diss Bill Ward like that? Especially when the drumwork on 13 is absolute boring metal shit. Bring back Bill!!!! It just ain't truly SABBATH without Bill Ward on the drums, even if the guy is an absolute curmudgeon

This is for Severian

areer Arc: Trent Reznor

From 'Hurt' to Hesitation Marks, the Nine Inch Nails godhead finds himself back where he started


By Steven Hyden on September 3, 2013

• PRINT

If you had to boil down Trent Reznor's persona to one word, that word would be "control." In the chorus of Nine Inch Nails' breakout song "Head Like a Hole," Reznor hollers that he'd "rather die than give you control." The liner notes of Nine Inch Nails' 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine, declare that "Trent Reznor is Nine Inch Nails." There is little doubt that Reznor has been fully responsible for conceiving, executing, and presenting pretty much everything he's ever been associated with, in part because he always makes sure to strenuously point it out. For those who are only casually familiar with Nine Inch Nails' music (and therefore are inclined to view Reznor as a broadly rendered caricature), this compulsion to dominate is the totality of Reznor. It is as basic to our understanding of Trent Reznor as problematic punk-rock politics are to Kurt Cobain and quixotic battles with corporate ticketing agencies are to Eddie Vedder.
But to fully understand the evolution of Reznor's career over the course of nearly 25 years, it's also important to examine the long stretches of time when he was inactive. In many ways, how Reznor is regarded in 2013 has been largely shaped by forces he couldn't have possibly managed himself. So, before we cover all the pertinent landmarks on Reznor's career arc (including the great new Nine Inch Nails album, Hesitation Marks), let's briefly review three areas of apparent dead space located around those landmarks:
1.

Between the release of 1994's The Downward Spiral (the album that made Nine Inch Nails one of the biggest alt-rock bands on the planet) and 1999's The Fragile (the album that marked the end of alt-rock's commercial prime), Reznor spent roughly two and a half years touring and a little more than two years recording. This period includes Nine Inch Nails' historic appearance at Woodstock '94, which is easily the most memorable part of that otherwise historically inessential event.1 It also includes Reznor's work on the soundtrack to Natural Born Killers, which is easily the least offensive part of that otherwise historically inessential film.
The five-year wait between Nine Inch Nails albums didn't necessarily seem that long at the time — Reznor was omnipresent on the radio in spite of creating little in the way of new music.2 Bands that he had worked with (like Marilyn Manson), bands that included members he had worked with in the past (like Filter), and bands that wished they could've worked with him (like Stabbing Westward) all had hits patterned off of The Downward Spiral in the mid-to-late '90s. Even when Reznor retreated from view as a rock star, he was unavoidable as a genre. And this inevitably hurt Reznor's career by hastening the end of a musical trend that he defined.
Through no direct fault of his own, the densely produced, hyperkinetic, wildly melodramatic, and sadomasochistic gimp-pop that Reznor had perfected on the first three Nine Inch Nails records became inextricably linked to a specific moment in the '90s when that shit was hijacked and mass-produced by other people. When The Fragile finally came out and parachuted out of the Billboard top 10 after debuting at no. 1 the previous week — the album's 15-spot drop was the worst second-week sales decline in chart history at the time — Nine Inch Nails was suddenly perched on the precipice of full-on relicdom.
2.

Between The Fragile and 2005's With Teeth, there were two crucial developments that forever altered the future of Nine Inch Nails. In 2001, Reznor got sober, finally putting an end to a self-destructive cycle of alcohol and drug abuse that had begun during the post–Downward Spiral wilderness years and metastasized in the midst of The Fragile's hellish support tour. Two years later, about the time that Reznor tentatively planned to start working on With Teeth, Johnny Cash covered "Hurt" at the suggestion of Reznor's friend, Rick Rubin.
Reznor lent the (original) Man in Black his best song about one of his favorite topics: the cleansing beauty of all-consuming pain. But Cash gave Reznor something far more valuable: fresh credibility as a songwriter who didn't deserve to be relegated to the buzz bin of the previous decade. In Cash's soulfully gnarled hands, "Hurt" sounded like a folk song that had been whittled into the stump of a felled redwood hundreds of years ago. It provided Reznor a much-needed leg up in recontextualizing his music for a post-'90s world. Maybe it's too pat to argue that Nine Inch Nails went from seeming dated to timeless, just like that, but Cash's version of "Hurt" did make a case (for those otherwise disinclined to believe it) that Reznor deserved to be ranked among the most lasting musical artists of his generation.
3.

In 2009, Reznor announced that he was retiring Nine Inch Nails as a touring unit, and for a while there it looked like he might transition into a full-time career as the Music for Airports alternative to John Williams. His work with frequent collaborator Atticus Ross on the Oscar-winning score for 2010's The Social Network and 2011's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo were logical extensions of 2008's all-instrumental NIN release, Ghosts I-IV, and even large swaths of The Fragile. But before he could set off permanently into a world of ambient soundscapes, Reznor was obligated by his record company to deliver a couple of snappy new songs for a greatest hits LP. What he came up with was "Everything" and "Satellite," which hearkened back to the muscular synth-pop of Pretty Hate Machine. They also sounded a lot like music that is currently in vogue — arena EDM and Yeezus and futurist indie outfits like Fuck Buttons who are making some of 2013's most mind-blowing rock records on their laptops.
Those songs eventually inspired Reznor to make an entire album, Hesitation Marks, which manages the unique feat of simultaneously sounding like "classic" Nine Inch Nails and (accidentally) more contemporary than many of his alt-rock peers could ever dream of being. It's the opposite of what had happened to Nine Inch Nails in the wake of The Downward Spiral — just when Trent Reznor thought he was out, pop culture pulled him back in.

 

Catherine McGann/Getty Images It's revisionist history to say that Pretty Hate Machine and "Head Like a Hole" instantly became the favored soundtrack for disaffected middle schoolers in the early '90s. Maybe that was true if you watched MTV exclusively after 11 p.m. on Sunday nights. But for people who watched videos during the day, the introduction to Nine Inch Nails came via 1992's Broken EP (the band's first top-10 album) and its scathing single "Wish." The abrasive, borderline metal of Broken (which derived from Nine Inch Nails' pummeling live performances) is still Reznor's signature sound, even if it's been years since he's made music in that vein. It's similar to how some people still classify Bob Dylan as a protest singer in spite of the dearth of topical Dylan songs after 1963. In the popular consciousness, Reznor will always be a raging headbanger wailing away in the middle of a postmodern Thunderdome.
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