The Daily Spin, June 28
Nine Inch Nails | The Downward Spiral
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: The Downward Spiral (1994)
Artist: Nine Inch Nails
Link:
As industrial and vicious as this entire album is, in so many ways, it’s also gloriously orchestrated and eerily danceable. Under those creaky beats and whispering scratches are the hallmarks of what has made Trent Reznor such a force in the world of contemporary music, much as it did when this album was originally released.
Though they have fewer plays on Spotify, ‘Hurt’ aside, the back half of the album is really where I think it hits its stride, as a lot of the more violent elements fade into the background - never gone, never truly hidden, but sleeping, dormant forces that crackle with unspent energy through so many of these songs, even as the rest of the noise falls in the faded limbo between life and death in this conceptual movement into the beyond.
Twenty-nine years on, I’m most surprised at how well this album has aged - it feels a little odd to note that Reznor and company were ahead of their time, given the situation this album sprouted from, but it feels that way, listening to it. So many classic hooks in modern music, particularly at the fusion of electronic and rock in an industrial sense, feel directly attributable to Nine Inch Nails - so for every scratch on a chalkboard, I’ll take the gently arpeggiating chords of ‘A Warm Place’ and hold them close to my chest, to let them expand and float me home.
Rating: 8.5/10
Best Tracks: A Warm Place; Hurt; The Downward Spiral
Worst Tracks: March Of The Pigs