Nine Inch Nails, a.k.a. Trent Reznor, sure takes his
time making an album. He has averaged about five years between
releases over his career. You can hear it in his work though; the
production is pristine and meticulously crafted. His latest release
With Teeth is no exception. I found myself wishing that he
had put more energy into the creative factors rather than the
twiddling of knobs and sliders in the studio.
I used to await a new NIN album with anticipation of
what he would come up with next. Each of his first four albums
topped the previous release with originality and new sonic
dimensions to explore. Those first few albums were liked caged
beasts that had been starved and taunted to the point of hysteria,
and when you played them, the beast was released, springing forth
in a violent rage of beautiful noise and chaos. With Teeth
finds that beast a bit weary and beaten down. I missed the energy
and power of albums like Broken and The Downward
Spiral. It’s as if Reznor’s nihilistic angst has been worn down
to a shadow of its former glory.
There are few good songs. “The Line Begins To Blur”
shows some of that old negative energy that fueled his earlier
work. “You Know What You Are” and “The Hand That Feeds” sound like
throwbacks to the old days, but that’s one of the problems. They
come off like tracks that belonged on Broken but didn’t have
the juice to keep up with the other songs from that era. Now it
sounds like he’s just reworking his older material.
I was really disappointed overall with this disc.
With Teeth is sadly lacking in teeth. As much as I wanted to
embrace it, the songs don’t even come close to Reznor’s best work.
He essentially shoved the genre of Industrial Metal down our
throats and we swallowed it whole and embraced his originality and
the power of his music. Now he seems to be stuck in a creative loop
that just isn’t progressing.
