Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth [album]

Interscope Records

May 18, 2005, 09:22 PM

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To some degree, Trent Reznor was a victim of his own success. As a fresh-faced misanthropic hottie screaming about god, money, and the two-backed beast over a 'roid-ragin' Tron soundtrack, he was exactly what the kids wanted. But when Reznor journeyed into the center of his sound and his soul, the kids took a rain check, finding their fix of synthesized cathartic self-loathing elsewhere. (Linkin Park, I think you might owe somebody a thank-you card; ask Reznor about the one he sent to Wax Trax! Records.)

In 1996, the dude was so money that an EP of Downward Spiral remixes went gold, while both NIN full-lengths were well on their way to multi-platinum status. But in 2004, a full-length remix album covering the entire NIN oeuvre festered on the shelves of mall record stores, while Reznor's then most-recent studio LP (the double-your-pleasure doozy known as The Fragile) was shipping a measly one million copies.

Meanwhile, the Bennington-Shindoa think tank (and their many contemporaries) were setting both young pierced hearts and old moneyclips aflutter with sexless, sample-soaked tunes of dismay and despair. Where once they screamed, "You get me closer to God!," kids now shouted, "Shut up when I'm talking to you!," which is in line with, "I'd rather die than give you control!", except Reznor's "you" is some disembodied existential thing, the stuff of stylized drama. Chester's "you" is someone he knows; this time, it's personal, and he wrote it down in his journal. In AABB form.

In 2005, Reznor kicks off With Teeth with "All the Love in the World", a track that can easily be read as a response to his fading celebrity in the wake of the success of countless imitators ("No one's heard a single word I've said/ They don't sound as good outside my head"). From the start, it seems he's about to go spelunking up his colon yet again, ninth-grade poetry in tow. It begins pensively, with a wet drum machine beat punctuated by soft piano notes while Reznor asks the question on nobody's mind: "Why do you get all the love in the world?" And then comes the disco break.

The beat locks down. The piano gets in line. Reznor returns to the titular question-- this time in a falsetto-- and screams it back, call-and-response style, harmonizing with himself. A bass drum, tambourine, and backing vocals hop on board. And when the bassline kicks in, and it's as though he's dropping a mirror ball on Goth Night at Club Velvet, as all the young Robert Smiths and Siouxsie Siouxs in the crowd proceed to drop it like it's hot. "All the Love" has nothing on the porn-serious bump-and-grind of "Closer", but it's not trying to horn in on that action. For about 90 seconds, there's an epidemic of full-on Kool and the Gang dance fever-- and it actually sounds fantastic.

On "Only", Reznor speak-sings his way to each chorus, playfully talking about picking scabs and other sorts of self-castigating things. And, wow, what a ridiculous chorus: "There is no fucking you/ There is only me." It's like he's singing to himself in the mirror, either restaging the Buffalo Bill scene from Silence of the Lambs, or the Jena Malone/Susan Sarandon hairbrush bit from Stepmom. "You Know What You Are", meanwhile, is in line with what typifies hyper-aggressive NIN teeth-gnashing, though it's accentuated with the unmistakable might of Dave Grohl on the traps, ripping off those machine-like 16th notes. Elsewhere, lead single "The Hand That Feeds" finds some on-the-one magic, while "Getting Smaller", the record's poppiest track, comes off as a faster-paced cousin of Pixies' "Planet of Sound" (with a Pere Ubu quote thrown in for you hipster cats). And let's not leave the Mark E. Smith nod from "With-ah Teeth-ah" unmentioned.

As expected, the album does eventually find time for a brief detour into the sort of twinkling soundscaping that's perfect for staring off into space and forgetting the pains of quotidian torture, but for the most part, With Teeth manages to flip the script on Reznor's recent M.O. Instead of fronting like a more feminine Al Jourgensen-- hard, coarse, yet not totally abrasive-- Reznor comes across as the masculine yin to Shirley Manson's alluring yang: playful, coy, and with a flair for the dramatic.

The disc ends with the tortured Bowie-esque balladry of "Right Where It Belongs". Here, Trent's piteous ruminations on what-the-hell-ever-- ("What if all the world you think you know/ Is an elaborate dream?") are slyly undercut by an audience's cheers and applause. It's Reznor as a leather-clad Elton John, sitting at the piano to play "Candle in the Wind" one more time. But rather than indulging in a pointless rehashing of past glories, With Teeth finds Trent Reznor moving forward by coming to terms with what he hath wrought. This head like a hole's come a long way, baby.

-David Raposa, May 11, 2005

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