slopesandsam
06-27-2013, 11:31 PM
I purposely haven't listened to The Fragile in years. My intention was to wait until the Deluxe edition came out, so that I might get to experience a facsimile of hearing it for the first time again. But the imminent release of new NIN got me so itchy to hear old NIN that I caved and listened to The Fragile again today.
I'm a NIN fan who thinks that YZ is one of NIN's best albums, and I think of The Slip as NIN's Low (not NIN's low point - NIN's version of the Bowie album "Low"), but The Fragile is still my all time favourite album, and I've been wanting more NIN that sounds like that pretty much since 1999. Until today, though, I didn't really have a good way of describing that sound to myself. But listening to the album again, I realised that every noise mixed into The Fragile sounds hand-crafted; painstaking carved by a master audio carpenter. And there are thousands of them, expertly fitted together.
Post-Fragile NIN doesn't have this quality. It sounds like pre-packaged noises, expertly fitted together. I might be dead wrong about that. I know basically nothing about music production - hence my ridiculous carpentry metaphor.
I don't have a particular problem with this. As I said, I adore YZ. It was exactly the sort of crunchy, electronic cacophony I wanted to hear when it came out. I might even go so far as to say that Vessel is my favourite individual NIN song. And I wouldn't be surprised to find out that hand-crafting all those sounds for TF was insanely hard, painful work that Trent never wants to have to go through again. But man, I'd love to hear some NIN like that again now.
I'm a NIN fan who thinks that YZ is one of NIN's best albums, and I think of The Slip as NIN's Low (not NIN's low point - NIN's version of the Bowie album "Low"), but The Fragile is still my all time favourite album, and I've been wanting more NIN that sounds like that pretty much since 1999. Until today, though, I didn't really have a good way of describing that sound to myself. But listening to the album again, I realised that every noise mixed into The Fragile sounds hand-crafted; painstaking carved by a master audio carpenter. And there are thousands of them, expertly fitted together.
Post-Fragile NIN doesn't have this quality. It sounds like pre-packaged noises, expertly fitted together. I might be dead wrong about that. I know basically nothing about music production - hence my ridiculous carpentry metaphor.
I don't have a particular problem with this. As I said, I adore YZ. It was exactly the sort of crunchy, electronic cacophony I wanted to hear when it came out. I might even go so far as to say that Vessel is my favourite individual NIN song. And I wouldn't be surprised to find out that hand-crafting all those sounds for TF was insanely hard, painful work that Trent never wants to have to go through again. But man, I'd love to hear some NIN like that again now.