Nine Inch Nails ~ With Teeth

Release Date: May 3, 2005
Official Web: nin.com
Track List:

1. All the Love in the World 5:14
2. You Know What You Are 3:41
3. The Collector 3:07
4. The Hand That Feeds 3:31
5. Love is Not Enough 3:41
6. Every Day is Exactly the Same 4:54
7. With Teeth 5:37
8. Only 4:22
9. Getting Smaller 3:35
10. Sunspots 4:02
11. The Line Begins to Blur 3:44
12. Beside You in Time 5:24
13. Right Where it Belongs 5:04

Total Playing Time: 55:56

Trent Reznor in all his angst is back on the scene again with his 4th full release "With Teeth". I always look forward to his work, his music is an intelligent mix industrial guitars, raw emotion and voice that you can't ignore. I tend to need a long time to digest his new offerings, they tend to be so complex most times, it takes days and weeks of play time in different moods to fish out all the subtleties he includes. His last album, the double disc opus "The Fragile" was so much music, it took me months and seeing them in concert to truly get the flavour of that album. I'm hoping I have listened to it enough to give you a real impression, it has had to fight for play time with all the other good music that has been released in the last few weeks.

I was very interested to see how this album would differ since Trent has had a fairly public recovery of alcohol and substance abuse. I hate to say it but, fresh, raw emotion makes the best music. Surprisingly not all of his songs are as dark and lonely as the bulk of his previous work, some songs I would almost say he sounds happy, like in "All the Love in the World", it starts slow and asks "Why do you get all the love in the world?", but then builds into an acceptance, without changing the question. The first single "The Hand That Feeds" is exactly what you would expect from nin, it's become a quick favorite of mine, it has a strong tempo and direct lyrics, I expect lots or airplay and clubplay. Trent is a master producer and mixer, he knows how to expand songs from good to great, like the piano accompaniment he added to "Right Where It Belongs", he pushes things further by addings some cheering crowds later in the song to really bring the point of the song home, it just makes the song so haunting and memorable.

Trent has also decided to do something very cool and different with "The Hand that Feeds", he exported the raw file into Garageband format, you can download and remix as you would like (System Requirements: G4 or better, 512 ram 1GB+ recommended, GarageBand 2.0 or better). I've already spent a few hours playing around with it and I love seeing how the song is built. As much as I love music, I really don't know much about how to make it, and seeing a song like this it really makes me wish I did. I hope more artists follow his lead and open some of their songs up a little and allow the common folk to play around with it a little, I think it will really inspire many people to create their own works.

** If you'll notice I have made 3 songs in each of my reviews avilable for streaming. Enjoy! **

Best Tracks (in no particular order):

• The Hand That Feeds
• Only
• Every Day is Exactly the Same
• Right Where it Belongs
• Sunspots
  

Worst Track:

• With Teeth
  

Rating (out of 5 stars):  
¶    Wednesday, April 20, 2005