Nine Inch Nails
With Teeth
Interscope/Nothing

Such a whiner, that Trent Reznor. But so persuasive and so exciting. Western Pennsylvania native Reznor cut his recording and performing teeth in Cleveland in the last two years of the '80s, and now the first studio album in five years from the Nine Inch Nails mastermind might be his most cohesive ever. It blends the pop punch of his trail-blazing 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine, with the density of Downward Spiral, the 1994 album that cemented Reznor’s reputation as a brilliant hard-rock auteur. Sparked on several tracks by Foo Fighters/Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, With Teeth furthers Reznor’s preoccupations such as the fine line between seduction and servitude, the pleasures of submission and how very hard it is to break free of depression. For Reznor, depression is the hand that feeds; it’s his muse. Perhaps that’s why “The Hand That Feeds,” four tracks in and as driving as anything NIN has ever released, is the first single. It’s infernal disco for sure, and while it doesn’t build into anything, its mass and bile are thrilling. What follows “Feeds” is the more ambivalent and revealing title track. It’s not a stretch to see the title as Reznor’s euphemism for vagina dentata, a psychological term that translates to “vagina with teeth.” The song, one of the most attenuated on this otherwise singularly efficient CD, is about ambivalence, about being swallowed up by love – to the point of getting one’s penis bitten off. Reznor has some issues about women, it seems. It’s to his credit that several tunes here approach the love song, a relatively new field for our man of itch and release, of ambivalence and yearning, our specialist in self-hatred. (“I want to fuck you like an animal,” the hook whose censorship made “Closer” such a hit 11 years ago, isn’t about love; lust, yes.)

A gang of songs are radio-ready, like the first single, the Grohl-driven “You Know What You Are” (evoking “You Know Who You Are” from “Hate Machine”), the brutal “Every Day Is Exactly the Same,” and “Only,” one of Reznor’s most daring tracks. In addition, Reznor, who takes almost full credit for the songwriting, production and performance (Jerome Dillon plays some drums and is in the NIN touring band), is becoming more experimental. He’s flirting with soul and rap, he’s humanizing some tunes with choruses, and he’s applied some of the beautiful color from his tortured double album, The Fragile, to tunes like “Sunspots” and “Right Where It Belongs.” Who knows? This guy might be a romantic; sure sounded like that on parts of The Fragile, the overripe, provocative but incohesive work NIN released in 1999. To me, “Only” is the keeper. Not only is it funky, it’s all over the categorical map even as it’s sharply focused. Over a sharp, catchy drum beat, Reznor is talking to us here, telling us it’s hard to distinguish inside from outside, himself from the object of his desire. It’s so much easier to step outside himself and blame her/it/him/intoxication, to objectify. He’s good at that. But on “Only,” he’s good at much more. He’s stretching his referents, incorporating more than Ministry and the Beatles, piledriving, as usual, in order to dance, which is not NIN as usual. The message may be bleak, but damn, the beat is up. As is always the case, this NIN album, too, bears repeated listening. Beautifully sequenced – this will perform like a dream in concert; all its dramatics need is staging – it’s packed with texture even though it’s uniform, and beautifully designed, in attitude. Listen to it all the way through; don’t even let “Beside You in Time,” a passing weird track toward the end that pits two melodies a woozy half-beat away from each other (is it hypnotic? Or is it airplane turbulence?) stop you. Then listen again; you won’t be able to help yourself.
from Cool Cleveland contributor Carlo Wolff CWolff7827@aol.com

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