Dogmatic

It’s been well documented that a new Nine Inch Nails album only comes around every five years. The wait for new material from Trent Reznor is sometimes quite a challenge for his army of dedicated fans. Nine Inch Nails’ last release was the challenging and often misunderstood masterpiece, 1999’s The Fragile. An adventurous two disc musical extravaganza embelished with layer upon layer of sonic mastery.

So now we find ourselves in 2005 and the latest Nine Inch Nails album, ‘With Teeth’ has been unleashed to a rabid fanbase and a music world curious to see what Reznor has been up to. The expectations are always high when it comes to NIN.

The album opens with the surreal-like ‘All The Love In The World’. Sounding like a Radiohead-cum-Moby tune the song drifts through a haunting piano melody overlapping a somewhat, ‘drum and bass’ beat as a pleading Reznor questions what he can’t have and deeply coveting what he truly wants. The song slowly builds to a melodic climax with multiple layers of harmonizing vocals which rise and rise until the song strips itself back in typical Reznor fashion to the underlying piano melody. Beautiful stuff. At one point, this was my least favourite song on the album but I noticed myself singing the melody in my head to the point where I began to really enjoy the tune.

After such a calm and melodic start, the album kicks on with the ferocious ‘You Know What You Are’. Reznor’s vocals are peppered with venom and spite which brought back memories of ‘The Downward Spiral’ for this listener. In fact, one thing I did notice about this album, is that it captures many elements of albums gone past.

Continuing on with a typical Dave Grohl drum pattern, (Grohl beats the skins on about 80% of the album whilst regular NIN live drummer Jerome Dillon handles the rest), ‘The Collector’ plods along with some trademark Reznor soundscapes and grating guitar embelishments. The piano ivories twinkle throughout the song’s crescendo sounding very Mike Garson-like (of David Bowie fame).

The first single ‘The Hand That Feeds’ grooves with the best of them. This song just gets better and better with each listen. Best served nice and very loud - you’ll soon find yourself singing along to it. And of course, if you’re not happy with the mix, you can have a go at doing your own version of the track courtesy of Mr. Reznor’s Garageband download!

‘With Teeth’ I am convinced will be a huge commercial success for Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails. With some very catchy songs such as the magnificent ‘Only’ (which will be the album’s second single and feature a video directed by David Fincher) and the majestic synth/retro sounding ‘Sunspots’ there are just far too many strong and well constructed songs for this album to fail.

There are definetly elements of all of Reznor’s major releases scattered throughout ‘With Teeth’. And that can only be a good thing when NIN’s past works are nothing short of incredible pieces of music. Which is not to say that Reznor is rehashing old ideas, far from it… ‘With Teeth’ is most assuredly an innovative and rewarding 2005 release with plenty of new ideas and a vibrant, fresh approach to the beast that is Nine Inch Nails - a band which for the better part of the last 15 years has been the soundtrack to my life.