Artist: Nine Inch Nails
Label: Polydor Records
Release: 2013
Length: 61:50
Rating: 3.2/5
Four years after the announced breakup and Trent Reznor’s deliberate, temporary retreat from the stage, at least under the Nine Inch Nails banner, Trent once again proves himself a liar for commercial reasons and serves up something new, yet already heard. This is the eighth record, Hesitation Marks, which picks up the thread of Downward Spiral, the album of superlatives, along with the brittleness of The Fragile and the last verbal outburst, the total tonal overload of the space between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, The Slip. Hesitation Marks doesn’t flatter itself with slogans about revolution and a further evolution of sound, but it’s true that Reznor has deliberately distanced himself from the expectations of the masses, and instead of caving to the pressure of quasi-critical types, even among his own fans, the dictator of his own universe of darkness, mechatronic perfection and intellectual devastation is only he himself. The name of the record fits. The suicide and self-abolition didn’t work out; after the band’s creative veins touched the blade of a fatal ending, hesitation set in, and the traces stayed on the skin. The wounds of the hesitating executioner are that Reznor will never be able to fully give up NIN, because this hen carries too much gold and lays too many lucrative eggs, unlike some side product from Reznor’s free-range backyard. Reznor is a workaholic, and after the descent into a family project with his wife and West Indian Gril member Mariqueen Maandig, with dream pop and trip-hop on two slightly less resonant little records, the financial upside lies in a completely different liturgy, one that Reznor, let’s be honest, also invented and perfected to the point where he can rattle off, spit out and stitch together an album at any moment, half asleep, one that holds water, carries the NIN trademark, and still lets Reznor get away with quite a bit of provocation. Everything you’ll hear, you’ve heard before, but nothing new doesn’t mean the record won’t give off, with its minimalism, enough essence for deep debates and discussions: is this a deliberate stop in the same spot, or has an elemental, invisible shift in aesthetics a few inches forward happened in the meantime? I think you can ask yourself that a bit later; for now, let’s move on to the record itself.
Hesitation Marks is an hour-long mindfuck trip that tests the outer edges of what’s allowed at the surface of NIN sonics, and Reznor swaps the atmospheric flirting and fetishizing of death, destruction and darkness for minimalism, which makes it clear that the stray, angry rebel and decadent self-destroyer has been replaced by a mature businessman at peace with himself, focused solely on the quality of the work, with the past and the future mere anchor points of a coordinate system whose center of gravity is a single man, a single mind, a single deus sive natura, procreator of ritual rhythm, the sonic palette of the real: Mr. Reznor in person. Hesitation Marks is fractured and less compact, a stew of expertly measured electronics, light, lamps and clusters of a mechanical heartbeat. The palette of collaborators is more intriguing, as Reznor strikes a pact with them and serves up some damn fine spiced-up sound once again. King Crimson guitarist Adrian Below is one such name, and when Lindsey Buckingham and Pino Palladino get dragged into the story too, with Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder watching over the whole thing next to Reznor, the result comes close to perfect meditation and a sound that you’d have a hard time adding anything to without it all sounding forced. It’s also radical that, in an age when labels are restructuring, the NIN mastermind himself agreed to dance with the corporate squeezers, even though the label folks signed a risky blank check with Hesitation Marks, since this record will be very hard to sell to spoiled listeners who won’t dive into an ocean of sound without some punchier ad or a single. The sound of the album is skeletal, bare, held in reserve, and Reznor justifies the atmospheric strumming with the fact that there’s nothing new to add. »I’m just a copy of a copy of a copy /Evyrithing I say has come before« is the opening line of the first number, Copy Of A, and apart from shadows of past shadows and echoes of already-heard echoes, Reznor bases his reincarnation, the re-establishment of a working rhythm, on an existential crisis of relevance, and he doesn’t entirely leave his own dominion of depression, anxiety and gloom, at least aesthetically. The parameters are closer to early Depeche Mode or Bowie’s Berlin era than to the demonic metallic quality of modern dance toying with sound, and the flexibility of Reznor’s spine is downright sinister this time. The Atari sounds of Came Back Haunted are a reflection on a past steeped in the anger and aggression of bygone moments, creeping into the game from somewhere in the background, and Reznor deliberately shakes up and stirs the cocktail of sound this time. Find My Way is an atmospheric interjection that, like a good half of the record’s stitches, could easily have fallen under the wing of Mezzanine by trip-hop masters Massive Attack, and Reznor sounds energetically robbed and empty here. All Time Low cuts the depression with a funkier play of guitars, bass and drums that sound so gorgeous they could have been written for Jane’s Addiction or R.H.C.P., and on the danceable, clap-along continuation, the pointless Disappointed, Reznor doesn’t even ask whether you’re thrilled with what’s been served so far, or whether you’ll be demanding your money back for the record from your friendly music-media dealer, the kind who sells a lot, or, in all this massiveness of many things, very little.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy_hnW5wKN4
The dream pop of Everything sounds like another test of endurance for the nerves of everyone who expected a bit more darkness and an aggressive release of tension; instead came a post-punk, cheery injection of cynicism that bids farewell to the world and the faithful so far with the lines »Wave goodbye / Wish me well / I’ve become / Something else / Something else, something else / It’s just the world«, followed by a touch of metrics you’d expect from Prince, and Satellite may only deepen the resentment for many, even though the song, let’s be honest, is a gorgeous pop tune! Reznor is clearly an escapist striving to destroy all the temples he’s so carefully built until now, and the nihilism builds on a suspenseful approach to an eruption that climbs almost to the surface, then miraculously dies down somewhere and gets caught in the catalyst of a sublimated holding-back of the perfect ejaculation. Various Methods Of Escape, Running, I Would For You, In Two … Nothing shifts the record into top gear, and the fairly sharply conceived While I’m Still Here serves up anything but a demonstration of life’s explosiveness, with which the hour-long torture of suspense and restrained passion limps toward the finish line with the song Black Noise. A slowed-down, larpurlatistic final tangle of guitar sound and electronic ping-pong from the last pulses of the second-to-last song carries the composition to its end, and the tension never discharges, since it all resembles just a chapter that needs a full stop, a completion, an opening of the valves. This time, Reznor deliberately doesn’t offer that.
It’s probably an artistic stance with which Reznor punishes the world with his sadistically sonically depraved perfectionism, and there’s exactly as much essence as Reznor himself decided to squeeze out of himself into the whole of a universe of recessionary vacuum. The time has come for scrimping and saving energy, and at the same time the gentleman tried to squeeze one more drop out of an already worn-out fleet of rhythms and melodies. You can’t blame him. Anyway, a world where we’re all becoming mere approximations of ourselves, and where most of what’s said and heard is already a copy of a copy, a faded letter on the emptiness of a faded page, doesn’t deserve any better! In that respect, Hesitation Marks is perfectly in balance with the world around it, but apart from a muted soundtrack feeling, the complete musical accompaniment to an empty world of devalued reminders of emptiness, it offers nothing, or very little, concrete. So we can’t talk about peaks, but still, all you hardcore believers will take the record on board as a new gospel for the world, signed by a master who can afford to serve the world a bit more of a selfishly measured substrate of his heart and mind. It’s about stance and attitude, and here Reznor, with all his complexity, still stands halfway between critics of the system, remaining a rebel with a cause despite the minimalism of the sound, and Hesitation Marks is an hour-long pamphlet of slogans that, I believe, will get either a more explosive follow-up or lead to the artistic defragmentation of the last remaining shreds of a coherent universe of aggression into total cold, emptiness and nothing. The nihilistic positivism of the latest record could lead to that too …
Lineup
Trent Reznor – vocals, programming, instruments
Guest musicians:
Pino Palladino – bass (on tracks 2, 5, 9 & 13)
Lindsey Buckingham – guitar (on tracks 2, 12 & 13)
Adrian Below (guitar (4, 5, 9 & 12), backing vocals (7 & 11), synthesizer (7)
Eugene Goreshter – synthesizers (6, 11 & 12), strings (6), violin (11), bass (12)
Alessandri Cortini – synthesizer (1 & 3)
Ilan Rubin – drums (11), percussion (2, 3)
Joshua Esustis – backing vocals (11)
Production
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Alan Moulder
Track list
1. The Eater Of Dreams
2. Copy Of A
3. Come Back Haunted
4. Find My Way
5. All Time Low
6. Disappointed
7. Everything
8. Satellite
9. Various Methods Of Escape
10. Running
11. I Would For You
12. In Two
13. While I’m Still Here
14. Black Noise
