I love Big Man With A Gun
If I wasn’t on ETS, I’d have no idea that was Mariqueen doing those backing vocals (it’s not very audible). It coulve been anyone and most of us wouldn’t have known the difference.
Backing vocals are generally not supposed to be very discernible, but come on, it's impossible not to hear a woman singing there.
On the controversial side, I think Pino is a great bassist, but he's so NOT appropriate for the live band.
I guess you're not the type to read album credits too.
He worked for that iteration of the band in my opinion. Some people give him shit for standing still and bobbing his head and not running around on stage, but I've never understood why he needed to do that to be considered an asset to the live band. His bass playing really brought some extra "oomph!" to the tracks they played, and that's what really matters to me at the end of the day. Would he work with the current, more aggressive iteration of the band? Probably not, but there's a more ragged performance quality to this version compared to the more polished version we saw during the Tension tour.
Sometimes I look, sometimes I don’t. I saw people on here discussing her voice being used in the song. I had to go listen to it again since it was so subtle. At first I was listening for actual lyrics from her, only to hear the background sound that almost sounds like a synth or something.
Dinner With Sean is proof that T&A could make Strobe Light if they wanted.
Certainly worth arguing about.
Yep, the only official member of NIN other than Trent right now is Atticus. Although if you look at the FTDS credits for The Art of Self Destruction, Part One, there have been other official members in the past, as four other names are in the parenthetical explaining who NIN consisted of in 1995. I didn't even realize that there had ever been other members until recently.
But Mariqueen is just a guest on the track ... nothing to suggest otherwise. I'm not sure it was about getting a slice of "TP legacy"; she sings on the track, so she's in the show. Would be cool if she guested more often, especially if there's not gonna be any HTDA any time soon.
If we're being honest, there is no singular version of Nine Inch Nails. You basically have the studio incarnation and the live incarnation, with people filtering in and out based on the music being created and their own interests. The "band", as it were, is an ever shifting and evolving entity. The only constant in any of it is Trent.
Shit, it wouldn't surprise me if her being on the show was Lynch's idea. I can just imagine Trent and David Lynch getting together to talk about it, and Trent brings mariqueen and Lynch asks if she can be on it too.
Well, it is “The Nine Inch Nails”, and not NIN. Toatally different band!
This is exactly what I was saying. That's why I have no issue with Mariqueen being a part of NIN. It's always been a revolving door of collaborators. I honestly wish Trent would collaborate more outside of him and Atticus. Not The Actual Events saw some other folks coming in to record parts.
You should read Charlie Clouser's posts on Gearslutz discussing his work with NIN. He played a major part in that era of the band.
Last edited by neorev; 05-27-2018 at 06:52 PM.
Here’s something controversial that I’ll definitely get shit for: I’d like to see Atticus step away from NIN for awhile. Change of pace. Seems like a lot of the score stuff/HTDA/NIN can be interchangeable since 2011.
I was just teasin' ya. I had just posted a day or so ago that there are several HDTA tracks that sound exactly like NIN songs but with Mariqueen singing instead of Trent. I can kinda hear what you mean with the Lovers but not really with SGA.
I'm not sure Atticus' involvement is really the issue, though. I'm assuming that Trent is still kind of the main director/auteur (maaaaybe not with the scores), so you'd have to take that up with Trent. I think there are obviously *some* similarities, but HM is different enough from WO, which is definitely different enough from what we've heard of the trilogy so far, that it's not an issue. I think the scores are closest to HTDA, at times, but don't sound too much like recent NIN. Not beyond vague "feels" anyway, and even then I mostly don't hear it.
I personally thought that Welcome Oblivion was the most unusual NIN-related record I'd heard in some time when it came out. It sounded like they spent a lot of time on it (and they did) relative to the NIN releases after WT. It does have some similarities with the scores but it has a density of sound that I hadn't heard on a NIN or NIN-adjacent release since The Fragile, so it sticks out in the later Trent discography for me.
Bad Witch does not seem like it's gonna be a retread of anything NIN has done ever, save for some minor "Driver Down" or TPD vibes here and there.
This is always the thing I do struggle with. I’m not sure how much is Atticus, how much is Trent, etc. (even with credits and what not) There is that timeline of what seems that Atticus got more involved with everything and the music seems “same-ish”.
Interesting to banter about though, and a case of “what if”.
It's impossible to know who's doing what on each song but it seems like, from the Song Exploder on The Lovers, Trent does raw playing and Atticus chops up the audio and edits it into an actual backing track, and then Trent writes more on top of that. I believe they said they did something similar for GBDTD. That can't apply to every trilogy song easily, but it could definitely apply to at least a few of them. I would imagine that since NIN has been almost exclusively Trent except on the FTDS credits for 30 years, that it's still his final call on what he likes and doesn't even though they're co-writers now.
I still think the "sameness" comes down to there being much less time between releases, the fact that there is *so much* material if we include all the scores, and the fact that more often than not bands stop innovating midway into their career, if they ever revamped their sound at all. As crazy as Kid A/Amnesiac was for Radiohead, they never made another leap like that, just kept refining their sound and recombining old elements into new sounds and songs. And since it's hard to think of another big 90s band that kept changing their sound as much, I think both were really dependent on borrowing and transforming semi-underground/niche music like Warp Records into pop music structures, and I don't know who's doing that kind of innovation in music post-internet that they could be as "inspired" by (which is, I guess, why we have a song that sounds like a NIN remix of a Blackstar song).
Which is why I'm kinda surprised by the EP trilogy, and especially by GBDTD. I know not everyone loves the song, but they really never made a song that sounds quite like that before, which is really unusual for an almost 30 year old band.
Last edited by Pbgut; 05-27-2018 at 08:36 PM.
Calling it a nin remix of a blackstar song seems a bit condescending though. Please re-listen to blackstar, would do some good.
I must add that, talking of band doing new things decades into their career, I more often see, although not that often, "artists" trying to jump on a bandwagon and trying to adapt their style to the current sound. And so I'm glad that Trent and Atticus just.. don't give a shit. They might be inspired by the current new forms of music but really dive into what they want, into themselves, new and free-of-anything experiences, with The Trilogy.
You're right, it sounds condescending or at least flippant but I didn't mean it that way. I really love the track. It does not have any of the jazzier elements that Blackstar does, which is why it kind of reminds me of the NIN remixes of 90s Bowie songs where they'd be somewhat "simplified" to be more brutal or hard-hitting.
And that's true ... I was thinking more of successful changes to a band's sound, but there's plenty of stuff like Beck's Colors where the band or artist tries to sound a lot younger or more contemporary than it's capable of. But mostly that stuff doesn't stick in my memory.
I'd really love to hear both of those also, and the cover of "Sex Dwarf" they evidently had recorded around that time. I always wondered if "The Beauty of The Drug" eventually became the source material for Aphex Twin's part on "The Beauty of Being Numb", or even "The Perfect Drug".
I can't imagine how fucked up "Just do it" must have been to elicit that kind of reaction from Flood in the context of the other material on that record, but I've always really wanted to hear it though. Speaking of which, TDS turns 25 next year, and releasing these, in addition to everything else we haven't heard from Le Pig, would be an awesome way to celebrate the ol' girl turning the wrong side of a quarter century.