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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2008 > May > 15 > Entry
CD reviews: T Bone Burnett, Nine Inch Nails
T Bone Burnett
‘Tooth of Crime’
(Nonesuch)
Though reportedly adapted from spare parts — some of its tunes were written for a production of an old Sam Shepard play, others grew years later out of the play’s discards — T Bone Burnett’s “Tooth of Crime” hangs together as a standalone work. Granted, it’s a work not everyone will relish: Grim and caustic, it introduces its worldview with a song announcing, “This is a story which is based on a true story which is based on a lie.”
The Texas-raised star producer (who has helped craft classics for everyone from Elvis Costello to the Coen brothers) knows what he wants when it comes to his own infrequent albums: strutting beats with a limp, echo-drenched guitar (often from gifted sideman Marc Ribot) and the occasional weirdo gesture you’d expect of an artist who subtitles one of his songs “Make the Metal Scream.”
How dark are the songs here? Put it this way: When Burnett wants to do a tune co-written by Roy Orbison, who’s known more for melancholy than menace, it’s a cheerful little ditty called “Kill Zone.” (You might swear you hear Michael Penn on that track as well, but according to the credits only his onetime collaborator Jon Brion is present.)
The album’s emotional range isn’t wholly apocalyptic; it offers a bit of comically surreal gallows humor here, a sincere recrimination or two there — the latter, perhaps not coincidentally, sung by Burnett’s ex-wife Sam Phillips. However dark things get, though, the record’s sound is richly layered enough to keep you digging through for shards of optimism.
Recommended: “Kill Zone,” “The Slowdown,” “Anything I Say Can And Will Be Used Against You” — John DeFore
Nine Inch Nails
‘The Slip’
(Self-released)
It’s been 14 years since Trent Reznor whispersang, “I hurt myself today to see if I still feel” on the album “The Downward Spiral.” It doesn’t sound like the intervening time has given him much improvement of the senses. “I don’t feel anything at all!” Reznor cries on “1,000,000,” a track on “The Slip,” the new Nine Inch Nails downloadable album that debuted this month at the low-low cost of absolutely free.
Reznor has of late embraced new-media ways to get his music out: He incorporated an alternate reality game in last year’s NIN album “Year Zero,” then put out a free preview of “Ghosts I-IV,” an instrumental album, in March (the whole 36-track shebang sold online for $5).
It’s not really clear if Reznor is just clearing the vaults like Prince or if the prospect of outdoing Radiohead in online price experimentation has recharged his musical batteries.
But, like Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” “The Slip” feels like a summation of Nine Inch Nails’ whole catalog. It seems not like an experiment or a slipshod playlist of cheap-as-free B-sides. Instead, it’s a recalibration of Nine Inch Nails’ ideas, textures and grooves. There is, of course, quick-tempoed thrashing and wailing about nothingness, degenerating electronic bleats that eat at the edges of songs like a hard drive virus, the obligatory goth-creepy piano ballad and the disco-metal dance party song for demons. (Hey, weren’t they playing something like that during the ridiculous groove orgy in “The Matrix: Reloaded?” It sure sounds like it.)
It sounds exactly what you would have expected a Nine Inch Nails album to sound like before all the recent digital pricing experimentation. There’s a seven-minute wordless mind grind called “Corona Radiata” that could have been recorded inside Reznor’s central air and heating vents. But there’s also “Demon Seed,” a propulsive tantrum that ends the short 44-minute album defiantly.
There’s not much to grow on here, but only someone who hates Nine Inch Nails could argue with the price. Download it to your iPod and you’ll even get album art for each of the 10 songs as well as lyrics.
It’s appropriate that “The Slip” is being used as ammo in the war between freed-up recording artists and the record labels. The album is certainly dark and hopeless enough to sound like it could be describing the industry.
“I need my role in this very clearly defined. I need your discipline / I need your help,” Reznor sings on “Discipline.” What he really needs right now, though, is your downloading.
Recommended: “Head Down,” “Lights in the Sky,” “Discipline” — Omar L. Gallaga
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By josh
May 18, 2008 7:48 PM | Link to this
The “ridiculous groove orgy” music in The Matrix Reloaded” was from a song by Fluke, who make excellent music. So I’m encouraged!