Second Spin: The Spiral Just Keeps Going...

Welcome to Second Spin, where VLM goes back and gives an album another listen to see if the first reaction was correct, or if perhaps it deserves better than the treatment it's received. This week's feature is the breakthrough album from Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral.

Let's get one thing straight; NIN was making noise before making noise was cool. And even now he's doing it better than most others who try (See also: Slipknot, KoRn). When I first got around to picking up the album about a year ago (it came out in 1994, so I'm a teensy bit behind), I gave it a spin, but was pretty ho-hum about it. Save for the well-known tracks like the blatantly sexual "Closer" and "Hurt", it all just kinda blended into one big clusterfuck of synths and screaming that made no sense to me.

Shows how much a year makes when you spend that year turning into a music geek.

From the moment I popped in the CD for the purposes of this entry, I was prepared to be listening to something significant. After watching all the meticulous work done simply in advertising Year Zero and learning about the recording process done in the house of the Sharon Tate murders, I realized there had to be more to this CD. And there was. "Mr. Self Destruct" opens the album with textbook Nine Inch Nails style wrack-and-thrash industrial sound, and that keeps going all the way to the amazing "Heresy", "March of the Pigs", and "Ruiner". After getting the radio-friendliness out of his system, Trent Reznor dives back into the balls-to-the-wall soundtrack to fornication. Personally I had a hard time keeping up with the tracks and their inherent mechanized trippiness. But nonetheless its still amazing for listening to during sex, or if nothing else, it's solid background noise. Don't get me wrong; as much as it may not be my cup of tea, Downward Spiral was still a great album and something that really does grow after a few listens.

==TJ==