Year Zero
Posted on April 16, 2007 - Filed Under Media, Music |
Having listened to the album extensively since I bought it yesterday (HMV jumped the gun with the release) I feel I’m now in a reasonably good position to assess it. Therefore, I now pronounce it AWESOME!!!11
Okay, some qualifications are necessary here. It’s not the finest album I’ve ever heard, and I’d even be slow to describe it as the best NIN album ever, but it’s really, really good in various (occasionally slightly unconventional) ways.
Like all NIN albums apart from the scattershot fusion that was the rather awful [with teeth], Year Zero sounds like a distinct body of work. The songs meld together almost seamlessly and there are no jarring rock numbers shoved in there for the sake of airplay.
This sense of cohesion is enhanced by the ‘story’ the album tells. Year Zero is a concept album set sometime in the 2020s, which don’t sound like the nicest of times to be living in. I’m not going to say too much about the story because I don’t know all of it, but basically the idea is that some weird, hand-shaped apparitions (known as ‘The Presence’) start showing up in places and demand that people stop screwing up the world (I may be providing an environmentalist’s interpretation here), religion becomes more important, factions fight, society frays or breaks down entirely, and the world ends. I may be wrong about quite a lot of that; I guess that’s the joy of concept albums.
As Trent says in the interview, the lyrics of the different songs represent the perspective of the various actors in the scenario. Hence, the is the slightly unsure ‘Good Soldier’, the ignorant, avaricious, slack-assed idiot in ‘Capital G’, etc… Whatever you make of the story itself, it’s a welcome departure for NIN given that Reznor’s been writing the same album lyrically for the last 20 years.
In terms of music, Year Zero definitely sounds like Nine Inch Nails, but it’s Nine Inch Nails doing something new. It’s a very atmospheric album, far more so than even The Fragile and The Downward Spiral. Trent wheels out his tingly-piano-over-electronic-fuzz trick quite a bit, and there’s almost always distorted synth smouldering in the background. The drumming contributes a lot to the feel of the album too. As stated previously, there are really no stompy rock songs on this album; it’s certainly not another Broken. Lead single ‘Survivalism’ is about as fired up as things get, and after the initially few songs the album becomes a decidedly slower affair. This is not to say that it mellows out, but rather that Reznor refrains from the rapid guitars and screaming that has characterised much of his career. The last three songs together make for a very strong album closing. In true NIN tradition they’re all rather melancholy yet beautiful, and the final song ‘Zero-Sum’ has a surprisingly anthemic air to its chorus, which contrasts remarkably with the spoken word verse ripped almost straight out of ‘The Downward Spiral’. (Look at the CD after listening to the album all the way through for extra awesome.)
The marketing campaign for the album is worth mentioning, if only because someone went to a lot of trouble for it. Having picked up some obscure clue form a tour T-shirt, some dedicated NIN fans discovered a long string of websites connected with the Year Zero story, with each one containing clues for the discovery of the next. Some of them involve the government drugging water supplies or something; I’m sure the story becomes more interesting if you get into it. There are also phone numbers (US only, I can affirm) that come with the album or from other clues that play recorded messages of people that have been rounded up by police and fired at or some such. Another cool little gimmick is that one of the leaked tracks from the album displays an image of the ‘The Presence’ when viewed along a spectograph. I think it’s cool anyway.
A measure of the efficacy of this viral marketing campaign is the amount and quality of fan-generated Year Zero promos such as music videos of leaked songs, straightforward ads, and even videos of ‘The Presence’. While I don’t mean to dwell on the superficial, I think the promotional campaign for the album is pretty cool in that it kind of feeds into the album story.
So how do I rate Year Zero? I tend to think of Nine Inch Nails as my band, so I’m a little reluctant to tell everyone to go out and buy this. However, I think I can pretty honestly say that this album is not for everybody; indeed most people will probably regard it as typical self-indulgent shit from Trent Reznor. I like it though, and in my opinion it blows crap like Pink Floyd, Muse, Radiohead, Billy Corgan sans Pumpkins, the Pixies, Bright Eyes, etc. (did I miss anyone’s favourite band?) clear out of the water, and that’s all that matters on this blog.
8 for the album itself
+ 2 for the background story, album sleeve & other Year Zero bells and whistles
- 1 for never coming to Ireland
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9 / 10
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Ok well I hope you’re happy. Now pray with me that the New Pumpkins album (released 7.7.07 btw) doesn’t blow giant donkey balls*.
*relative to The Smashing Pumpkins, not Zwan and solo-Billy because lets be honest, if he can’t top that….