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Nine Inch Nails - [WITH_TEETH]

I somehow managed to listen to only one album today. The good thing is that it was an album by my favorite band. With Teeth was released on April 27, 2005 in the United States. Fans of Nine Inch Nails know that the band take five years between Studio albums. Trent took six between The Fragile, and With Teeth. He cited the reasons for the greater than usual gap being his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, and being burnt out on the music business. Trent stated in many interviews that he wasn't sure if he had a point of view anymore, or even if the public would care if he did. In interviews for his next album Year Zero he would claim that he let his insecurities get the better of him, and allowed too many people to have input into the creative process of this album, and that the overall album suffered due to this insecure wavering.

The albums recorded by most post-rehab musicians tend to be weak, and ill-defined. A lot of artists go through rehab to find jesus, and lose their perspective. They just aren't sure what to do, and they don't know where to go from their "new beginning". Although Mr. Reznor seems to think he suffered this same artistic fate I don't agree. I also believe that the reason that he didn't suffer the horrible distress of recording an album lost in the emotions of "getting clean" is that he took three years to decompress before he stepped back into a recording studio. Reznor claims that his last encounter with illicit substances was July 11, 2001. In 2004 he decided that he still wanted to create music, and that he did have a voice.

The original working title of With Teeth was BleedThrough. Which one assumes is something of a double entendre having to do with the entrance of blood into a syringe after opiate injection, and the bleeding of noises from one channel to another. There are various other meanings that can be taken, and many of them are represented in the lyrics of this album where the most commonly repeated set of words is "bleeding through". It is an apt title, but Reznor scrapped it because "it was supposed to be about different layers of reality seeping into the next, but I think some people were thinking about blood or a tampon commercial." The new title fit just as well because on his way beck to the music world Trent came out with teeth bared.

I preordered With Teeth along with "The Hand that Feeds" single in March on Amazon. The album leaked to torrent sites about two weeks before the street date, so of course I downloaded it, but I did not listen to anything from the album until I had the DualDisc in my hand. The first time I listened to 2005's new NIN album was in 5.1, and I blew out a pair of my front channel speakers. I sat on the floor in my mostly empty living room of my luxury apartment in Orlando, FL with my PowerBook displaying the .pdf lyrics sheet in front of me in a dark room. That initial listen influenced every future listen I would ever have to this album. It ingrained a time and a place on my primary audio cortex.

From beginning to end With Teeth is a wave that lulls and crashes. The album opens with watery beats, and quietly sung lyrics wondering about who the singer is, and increases to a crescendo of guitars and heavy drumming. The next track "You Know What You Are" is the loudest, and heaviest song on the record. It begins with heavy programmed drum beats and then an arpeggiated synth line that cuts to the bone. Screams the words "Don't you fucking know what you are?" that might be directed at Trent Himself. The third track "The Collector" is a song about the peculiar habits of addicts. We have this tendency to start collecting random items for no apparent reason. It is simply a trait that many addicts have, and this simple fact made me connect with this song in a very personal way. "The Collector" is a bass and piano driven rock song, with less to do with industrial than Trent's adoration of tunesmithing.

By track four we reach the album's first single, and Nine Inch Nails' first No. 1 single in the United States "The Hand That Feeds" I'm not going to continue with this track by track description, it is unnecessary and it has been done better elsewhere. "The Hand That Feeds" is also where this album begins to fall apart for me. After three incredibly emotional songs a politically charged song strikes out at me. The song is also not all that great. It is a synth-rock song and is probably better than ninety per-cent of everything else at the time, but that isn't good enough for Nine Inch Nails. The album also had two other No. 1 Singles "Only" which was a kind of new-wave rocker was entirely deserving of the ranking, as was "Every Day is Exactly the Same" Which is another song about the daily behavior of addicts.

Most of the rest of the tracks on the album are very introspective, and downtempo. They are, in some ways, more interesting, but they rock less. Depending on my mood I really like "Sunspots" and "Beside You in Time" but they have a more experimental vibe to them than a lot of the rest of the album. Foreign releases had a few remixes tacked on "Right Where it Belongs v2" and "The Hand that Feeds (Ruff mix)." The former is an even more sedated version of "Right Where it Belongs" and the later is a Photek remix of "The Hand That Feeds" that makes the song worth listening to.

I have very mixed feelings about this album overall. While I'm listening to it I almost always like it until I get to around track ten. After that it sort of falls off into an endless abyss of lost focus and what was almost certainly Trent's "too many people giving input into how the record should sound" I think that he recorded these songs as a backlash to the "weakness" he had showed in the better songs that came before them. Some days I love tracks ten through fourteen with all of my heart, but it is a matter of mood. On that first listen "Beside You in Time" broke me down, but these days it seems like it is missing something and meandering. I still come back to this album more often than any other Nine Inch Nails album, though I wouldn't ever call it my favorite. I like Pretty Hate Machine, The Downward Spiral, and The Fragile better, but this album has an immediacy and a certain consistency that the others don't.