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Band Name: Nine Inch Nails
Album Name: With Teeth
Rating: 4.5 / 5 User Rating: 4 / 5
Label: Interscope Records
Buy Album: Amazon.com
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Tracklist
1. All The Love In The World
2. You Know What You Are?
3. The Collector
4. The Hand That Feeds
5. Love Is Not Enough
6. Every Day Is Exactly The Same
7. With Teeth
8. Only
9. Getting Smaller
10. Sunspots
11. The Line Begins To Blur
12. Beside You In Time
13. Right Where It Belongs
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Despite what some critics may tell you, this album is worlds away from The Fragile or the Downward Spiral. You'd have to go as far back into Trent's catalogue as 1989 to find something that even remotely resembles this album, and even on Pretty Hate Machine you won't find the same focus, the same confidence, or the same sound. This album stands alone in Trent's repetoire, and that serves to his advantage.
The Fragile found NIN at its densest and perhaps most inaccessible, with layers upon layers of screaming and noise and dissodant distortion, sprawling out into over 100 minutes and two discs of music (not to mention SIX instrumentals, each as abstract as the other). That doesn't mean that the album was bad, because it was truly a monument among modern music, but it was also unfocused, scattered, and strangely diffident -- Trent didn't know where else to go so he just piled on the noise.
With Teeth is about as far as you can get from that without it not being Nine Inch Nails.
From the very first track, "All the Love in the World," it is clear that we are listening to a redefined band, with dance beats, high-pitched crooning and pretty piano playing, this is not the same Trent we knew six years ago. The instrumentation may be sparser, but it has lost none of its trademark complexity or subtlety -- it has merely been broken down to what was essential, and everything else was rightly scrapped. There is no fat on this album.
"I'm becoming less defined as days go by, fading away and well, you might say I'm losing focus. Kinda drifting into the abstract in terms of how I see myself. Sometimes I think I can see right through myself."
That sounds like pretty standard lyrics coming from Trent Reznor, except on this particular occasion, coming from track number 8, "Only," it's delivered over a retro-disco beat with Trent speaking aloud in a deadpan self-aware humor that is completely nonexistent on his previous albums. To say that this is the usual nihilistic NIN garb is unfair and simply untrue, because every song on the album demonstrates otherwise. What was once nihilistic is now full of the empowerment and responsibility of being able to believe in oneself, what was once self-destructive is now a reflection of where to move on towards after the self-destruction (Trent was reportedly in rehab during the six-year post-Fragile hiatus). Critics who say that this is the same old, same old almost make me wonder if they were listening to the same album as me.
With Teeth is as good or better than anything Trent Reznor has produced so far, and that's saying quite a bit. He has lost none of his talent, ability, genius, or relevancy in the past six years, and he's as solid as ever. And having Dave Grohl as a replacement for electronic drum-loops helps, too.
Standout tracks include: "Only," "The Line Begins to Blur," "Every Day is Exactly the Same," and the absolutely sublime finisher to rival "Hurt," "Right Where it Belongs."
Review by: J.D. Taylor
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