With Teeth: Tentative Sequence

[TheBang]

Also, why would a tentative tracklist sent a label include so few tracks?

Per Rob's tweet, this was not just for the record label. They produced these for other purposes, including sending them to potential collaborators. And press, apparently:
https://www.theninhotline.com/archiv...ticle.php?id=2

So the existence of this promo was known previously, but not the appearance or contents. The fact that Rob recognized the promos, and that the one-disc conforms to previously known info indicates to me that they are probably genuine. It's just this download which is bullshit.

Does anyone here have any links to posts on facebook where this CD was originally mentioned (it was allegedly first mentioned by someone on the facebook group Nine Inch Nails Collecting and Trading...but I looked at every post on that group and couldn't find it) or any posts on ETS about this disc?

Here's the previous discussion about it on ETS: https://www.echoingthesound.org/community/showthread.php?p=480625

[Wulgaren]

that archive.org upload is indeed fake. confirmed by folks in the nin discord

[TheBang]

Relevant discussion in Discord about the upload:

"Hey guys its not real! The guy who send it to me had said that is was fake... so i quickly removed it from reddit"
"The version of everyday is excatly the same is on remix.nin.com"
"The rest of it is fan made he said! I am so sorry guys"

[Sequenteon]

Hey, ETS. I've reached out to the person who has the November 2004 discs. Haven't heard back. From what I've been told though, it sounds like the person shared images of the discs and art to validate the OTHER tentative tracklist disc that was listed on Ebay as potentially authentic. It appears they were only posting to be helpful in that discussion and never had any intention of sharing or selling their longer set with the unreleased demos. If that's the case, it's unlikely we'll ever hear their contents. I hope in the future the unreleased demos may be paired with a re-release of With Teeth. Fingers crossed.

[Erneuert]

I was just about to post this in the Random Questions thread, but actually felt it more appropriate here.

Remember back in 2005 when the With Teeth track listing was first posted on nin.com, it only had 12 tracks? Then shortly after... maybe a few hours, “Love Is Not Enough” was added to it.

I wonder if this was a last-minute decision and there were actually other tracks available to pick from, and this just happened to be one of them? Maybe someone can ask Rob on Twitter why LINE was initially revoked? So many questions arise from this era, I swear...

[buckaroo]

Hey, ETS. I've reached out to the person who has the November 2004 discs. Haven't heard back. From what I've been told though, it sounds like the person shared images of the discs and art to validate the OTHER tentative tracklist disc that was listed on Ebay as potentially authentic. It appears they were only posting to be helpful in that discussion and never had any intention of sharing or selling their longer set with the unreleased demos. If that's the case, it's unlikely we'll ever hear their contents. I hope in the future the unreleased demos may be paired with a re-release of With Teeth. Fingers crossed.

I always got the impression that a With Teeth Deviations would have a ton of potential material. Please release this!

[Senateguard33]

I always got the impression that a With Teeth Deviations would have a ton of potential material. Please release this!

They'll be in instrumental form though. One of these days we'll get to hear the complete unreleased songs. Was It Worth It? from The Fragile is at the top of my list.

[buckaroo]

They'll be in instrumental form though. One of these days we'll get to hear the complete unreleased songs. Was It Worth It? from The Fragile is at the top of my list.

100% agree. That track was one of those didn't know I needed it until I heard it... really fills a gap for me by adding a more "pop-ish" track to the album. Great companion track to the Big Comedown.

I don't think Trent realizes how much joy releasing something like that would bring to the community.

[Senateguard33]

UPDATE: this file upload to archive.org is faked and not from the actual CD (which is probably real). See discussion further down the thread

--------------------------------------

So, I don't think I missed a discussion about this, but if so, someone please point me towards it.

That "With Teeth (Tentative Sequence 12.23.04)" internal record label advance CD was posted two months ago, I guess:
https://archive.org/details/withteet...quence12.23.04

No one noticed? 2007 NIN ARG fans are ashamed to be in the same fandom as you!

Anyway, it seems to check out. The auction closed on 1/24. If it was mailed by Amoeba on 1/25, that means the auction winner probably received it by 1/28, the same date it was uploaded to archive.org. I thought it might be a fake upload, because the cover art uploaded to archive.org is just a cropped version of the eBay cover image. But as we delve into the audio content below, we see it must be genuine.

1. Every Day is Exactly the Same 3:51 - It appears to be identical to "Every Day is Exactly the Same (Edit)" from a promo CD, rather than the album version.

2. Getting Smaller Every Day 3:39 - It appears to be the same as the album version, except without segues at the beginning and end of the track.

3. Only 4:45 - This is what cemented for me that this was genuine. Starting at 4:05, it has a different vocal ending, never heard before AFAIK (these lyrics were on the lyrics poster). Vocal effects missing at 2:55

4. The Hand That Feeds 3:37 - Different intro before the vocals come in.

5. Cages 5:01 - This one seems farthest from the album version in terms of mixing and mastering. It has the full unsegued intro (as previously heard on the Instrumental version). The falsetto outro (starting at 4:23) is missing the piano, and is slightly different at the very end (because it was modified when the piano was added).

I haven't done a full A-B comparison on all the tracks, so there may be additional subtle differences (like the missing vocal effect on Only) that I missed. Anyone else find any differences?

I also noticed that during towards the end of The Hands That Feeds, there is just drums and vocals on one of the refrains.

[Senateguard33]

that archive.org upload is indeed fake. confirmed by folks in the nin discord

Does someone in the discord group have ties to the NIN camp? What criteria determined that it is fake? Not saying that it's real, but would like some more insight into the topic.

[Wulgaren]

"The guy who send it to me had said that is was fake"

[Senateguard33]

"The guy who send it to me had said that is was fake"

Therefore, it must be true.

[tony.parente]

100% agree. That track was one of those didn't know I needed it until I heard it... really fills a gap for me by adding a more "pop-ish" track to the album. Great companion track to the Big Comedown.

I don't think Trent realizes how much joy releasing something like that would bring to the community.

Oh Trent knows.

There is a LOT of money to be made when it comes to the fragile, it's why a deluxe edition was never released and we got a definitive edition AND the deviations instead. There's probably another 2 $80 versions left in the pipeline before we get that $250 "complete" version in 5 years.

[Wulgaren]

not stopping you from believing they are real ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Senateguard33]

not stopping you from believing they are real ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not convinced either way. I just want some more insight into the matter, than "just some guy said they were fake"

[Sequenteon]

I'm not convinced either way. I just want some more insight into the matter, than "just some guy said they were fake"

I don't think any official source confirmed they were fake. It was more just a matter of evidence and deduction. The version of EDIETS is a remix that falls far out of the realm of production of the rest of the album and seems to have been done and released after With Teeth's release. Elements of RWIB seem to have been taken from the 5.1 mixes of the album and put in the track to suggest an "unfinishedness." The lyrics at the end of Only have been heard in the officially released multi-tracks. There is nothing in this group of songs that can't be found in NIN material from around the era that was completed and configured to serve a specific purpose...whether that be ambiance in a 5.1 mix, outtake in a multi-track, or interesting remix.

Just based on what we're seeing, all signs point towards someone NIN savvy enough putting together a fake tentative track-list because they knew they could make some quick cash. They knew if they made it just different enough by altering mixes and including some obscure material they'd probably get away with it.

It just doesn't make sense this would be real.

[shagg_187]

I'm not convinced either way. I just want some more insight into the matter, than "just some guy said they were fake"

The version of "Only" in this "Tentative Sequence" is taken straight from the multitracks distributed by TR/NIN. The chorus vocals are late in this track.

I distinctly remember there being a slight delay in the "There is no fucking you" vocals in the multitracks (Sony Acid).

[TheBang]

Just based on what we're seeing, all signs point towards someone NIN savvy enough putting together a fake tentative track-list because they knew they could make some quick cash. They knew if they made it just different enough by altering mixes and including some obscure material they'd probably get away with it.

To be clear, there's no evidence that the archive.org upload is in any way sourced from the CD-r promo. That upload was most likely created by someone to pretend to be from that CD, but as discussed in this thread, is demonstrably fake.

Based on the available evidence, however, I believe both CD's are probably genuine. Just no one has heard what is on them besides the owners, because they haven't shared.

[Senateguard33]

I don't think any official source confirmed they were fake. It was more just a matter of evidence and deduction. The version of EDIETS is a remix that falls far out of the realm of production of the rest of the album and seems to have been done and released after With Teeth's release. Elements of RWIB seem to have been taken from the 5.1 mixes of the album and put in the track to suggest an "unfinishedness." The lyrics at the end of Only have been heard in the officially released multi-tracks. There is nothing in this group of songs that can't be found in NIN material from around the era that was completed and configured to serve a specific purpose...whether that be ambiance in a 5.1 mix, outtake in a multi-track, or interesting remix.

Just based on what we're seeing, all signs point towards someone NIN savvy enough putting together a fake tentative track-list because they knew they could make some quick cash. They knew if they made it just different enough by altering mixes and including some obscure material they'd probably get away with it.

It just doesn't make sense this would be real.

Thanks, this is the kind of the response I was looking for. I remember the initial auction, it was sold by a well known record store's ebay page (starting at .01 cents like the rest of their CDs) Which means that whoever possessed the CD originally sold it to them for probably pennies.

Even if it is a bootleg, it just seems odd that just one copy came through their inventory, it's just really random.

There are tons of fake NIN promo CDs out there, and they are generally easy to spot. They are typically on ebay and the same seller will repost the same item for outrages prices until they get reported. Oddly enough, in my near 30 years of collecting, I've only seen this particular CD once.

There's been talk that the actual CD is real..but the archive.org copy isn't. It's just odd that someone would go through all that trouble of putting it together around the time of the eBay sale, for no personal or financial gain whatsoever. Just for the sake of driving ETS mad and bonkers? It could happen, but I'm skeptical about it.

The EIETS promo mix is well known. Easy, throw it in. Multitracks for THTF and Only have been around for ages. I can buy into that. But creating a version of RWIB using just a 5.1 mix? I dunno. There's too much audio information in each channel and nothing is really isolated. It would sound muddy and odd in parts. This sounds like a pro mix, so that must have been a pain in the ass to create. Even the unadultered intro and outro of Getting Smaller would be hard to do just based off 5.1 channels. The other curiosity is THTF is lower in volume and seems to have more distortion than the other tracks...as if it was intentionally done to discourage premature airplay, since it's the obvious single out of the bunch.

We can lean towards it "probably" being a fake, but I don't think we can 100% write it off either. It shall remain a mystery until we can get word from official channels, which may never happen.

[Leviathant]

There's been talk that the actual CD is real..but the archive.org copy isn't. It's just odd that someone would go through all that trouble of putting it together around the time of the eBay sale, for no personal or financial gain whatsoever. Just for the sake of driving ETS mad and bonkers? It could happen, but I'm skeptical about it.

Yeah who would spend their own time to make something pseudo-official just to drive ETS mad and bonkers?

(disclaimer: I don't know who put the fake together on archive.org, but I'm 100% confident that it's a fake)

[Senateguard33]

Yeah who would spend their own time to make something pseudo-official just to drive ETS mad and bonkers?

(disclaimer: I don't know who put the fake together on archive.org, but I'm 100% confident that it's a fake)

Thanks for chiming in. That's a very good point.

[botley]

The EIETS promo mix is well known. Easy, throw it in. Multitracks for THTF and Only have been around for ages. I can buy into that. But creating a version of RWIB using just a 5.1 mix? I dunno. There's too much audio information in each channel and nothing is really isolated. It would sound muddy and odd in parts. This sounds like a pro mix, so that must have been a pain in the ass to create. Even the unadultered intro and outro of Getting Smaller would be hard to do just based off 5.1 channels.

Pro instrumental mixes with clean intro/outros were released on Apple Music in the official NIN Connect playlists. These versions appear to use those, and the standard mixes during the vocal parts. Tricky but not impossible for a fan to assemble, and the multi-track timing discrepancy in "Only" is also a dead giveaway that a fan made this version by simply pushing all the faders up in that session... I expect THTF is the same.

[TheBang]

Oh Trent knows.

There is a LOT of money to be made when it comes to the fragile, it's why a deluxe edition was never released and we got a definitive edition AND the deviations instead. There's probably another 2 $80 versions left in the pipeline before we get that $250 "complete" version in 5 years.

[StockAvuryah]

Nice gif, there's an Atticus one to do, too

[tricil]

Nice gif, there's an Atticus one to do, too

Be funnier if it was:

Atticus Ross has left.

[Erneuert]

Hahahaha!

He knows we know.

On May 5, 2005, in the Access section of nin.com, Reznor simply replied with "?" in response to the following fan question: "In the .pdf file for the lyrics to the With Teeth album, there are [sic] appears to be songs listed with lyrics that do not appear on the Dual Disc CD/DVD album. Those songs include "Home," "Message To No One" and "The Life You Didn't Lead". Will these songs be released ever?"

[The Master]

Hahahaha!

He knows we know.

On May 5, 2005, in the Access section of nin.com, Reznor simply replied with "?" in response to the following fan question: "In the .pdf file for the lyrics to the With Teeth album, there are [sic] appears to be songs listed with lyrics that do not appear on the Dual Disc CD/DVD album. Those songs include "Home," "Message To No One" and "The Life You Didn't Lead". Will these songs be released ever?"

Has anyone here ever heard the songs
"Message To No One" and "The Life You Didn't Lead" before? This is the first time I've even heard about them. 🤔😃

[Erneuert]

Has anyone here ever heard the songs
"Message To No One" and "The Life You Didn't Lead" before? This is the first time I've even heard about them. 🤔😃

They likely don’t exist as songs:

http://www.nin.wiki/With_Teeth_(halo)#Outtakes

More just additional lyrical ideas, akin to many other songs from the album containing additional unsung lyrics on the lyric poster.

With the exception of The Collector. It’s additional lyrics have been sung live before.

[Leviathant]

(disclaimer: I don't know who put the fake together on archive.org, but I'm 100% confident that it's a fake)

Oh man, 2020, am I right? So, I've prepared a dish for myself and I'd like to share it with you before I eat:



Back in March and April, there sure was a lot going on! I wasn't even confident that I'd have a job tomorrow when I posted that I was confident this was fake. But a few weeks ago, I revisited this archive.org download and did what I probably should have done in the first place, and get a little more forensic about what I was listening to. I could also have paid just a little more attention to detail. Specifically, when I recently revisited the archive.org download, I started at Cages, and with enough distance from this thread that I honestly completely forgot it existed. I even forgot that the instrumental version had the full intro, but that was what stood out to me on my first playback. It's probably a good thing I forgot, because otherwise I might not have continued... hopefully what follows isn't too out-there.

So I loaded Cages into Reaper, and I loaded my rip of RWIB from my 2005 copy of WT, and I set RWIB to be right-channel only - so, no piano at the end. And then I do what I normally do when I want to check if a mix is the same - I check for phase cancellation. When I lined up the peaks in Reaper, the first thing I noticed was that Cages already had an inverted phase compared to RWIB, so I didn't have to hit the Phase button in Reaper. I lined up an obvious peak, hit play, and there was a slow phase sweep - okay, so, very slightly different playback speed. Interesting, but nothing definitive. I spot-checked throughout the song, and at about 3:20, when the phase sweep hit the point where everything should have canceled out - there was a solo piano left in the mix.

!!!

So what? Very, very slightly different playback speed, and a measure or two of a double piano line. Is that definitive proof? Not really, I guess. Like we speculated earlier in this thread, that's not outside of the realm of possibility for someone who's determined to make a credible fake.

Let's switch up and go to Only. The obvious differences are in the panning that @TheBang mentioned, and the extra lyrics. Putting them together in Reaper, the version from Archive.org is noticeably longer - again, playback speed is a bit different from the album version. So I set the album version to play back at a rate of 0.998808, which is close enough to do some spot testing with phase cancelation again. Once again, the archive.org version is already an inverted phase from the album version, and at first, they cancel out really well. I skipped to the second verse, and it's kind of a different story - a lot of the instruments phase out, but the vocals don't. Upon closer examination, the second verse on archive.org's Only is a copy-paste of the first verse, up until the part where Trent sings "Only" - his first time singing the word in the second verse sound cut off, like he had to stop to wet his whistle. I couldn't find an instance of him singing "only" like this in the multitracks, or in the album version. The vocals in the archive.org take sound a little late to the beat, generally speaking, too. So now we've got a vocal take that doesn't appear anywhere else.

Also, "Because you were never really real to begin with" and "I had this funny feeling I just knew it's something bad, I just kept picking" don't have the panning & phasing effects. In fact, the vocals on the archive.org version are notably dry in a way that couldn't be done with the provided multitracks, which had the effects backed in.

That crow's looking mighty tasty now that I look at it again.

Getting Smaller Every Day. Again, very slightly longer than the album rip, phase already inverted from the album rip. I set the album version to play back at 0.998854 and line things up - and it mostly cancels out, except there are snare hits that pop out of the mix. Might've been added to the final mix? The guitars in the final portion didn't immediately line up, but with some adjusting, I get them to phase out too - except for occasional snare hits. Fakeable? Maybe. It'd take a lot of work. A lot.

Every Day Is Exactly the Same. I line it up to my rip of the German promo CD, and it zeros out completely. It is the exact same track.

The Hand That Feeds - it's clear when I drag this into Reaper that unlike all the other tracks, it's unmastered. In playback, whole sections of the mix are missing. If it weren't for 'Only', I might try to recreate this with the multitracks, to see if I can get a phase-perfect cancellation the way I did with Every Day Is Exactly The Same, but I'm not going to bother.

Reviewing the tracks:
1) "Every Day Is Exactly The Same" could be 'faked' in that it could just be a digital copy of the promo CD.
2) "Getting Smaller Every Day" could be 'faked' in that you could alter playback speed very slightly, and very carefully mix in snare hits and snare rolls atop the studio mix, and invert the phase of both channels.
3) "Only" is mixed and mastered similarly to how the album version is mixed and mastered, but contains un-effected vocals and a vocal take not available anywhere else. I'm not sure how you fake that. The phase is inverted from the album version.
4) The Hand That Feeds could theoretically be made using the multitracks. I haven't spent time on it, because at this point I'm thinking these are legit.
5) Cages could be 'faked' by blending the intro from the instrumental version with the studio version, slightly changing playback speed, inverting the phase, and dubbing piano in for about a measure or two, just to do it.

So here's my 2021 take:
This is a rip of that CDR that showed up on eBay. Cages cutting to mono was probably the watermark, so that if this did leak online, they would know which CDR it came from. The Hand That Feeds wasn't finished at the time of burning this, but it was obviously on track to be a single, so it was included. Later, someone in the EU put together a promo CD that included the mix from this CDR, so that's not actually a remix or an edit, but an early version of the track that predates finalizing the album. The differences in playback speed for all the rest of the tracks are because for all the work NIN does in computers, Trent was still recording to tape, and the tape machines might not have been recently calibrated when they made these stereo masters.

And here's one caveat: I compared this to the 2005 version, and not the audio from the DE edition. If "Only" hadn't been so convincing, I would have continued to investigate, but I don't think it's worth looking into - maybe I'm wrong.

Sorry for not doing a more detailed comparison at the time. I'm off of work this week (I took a new job over six months ago) and I've taken care of a lot of other things that were weighing on me, so I finally had some headspace to do my usual thing here. When this thread started, a lot of people were already making pretty convincing arguments that it was a fake, and I didn't feel like putting in the work myself, and I threw an opinion into the mix anyway. I hope y'all listened to the people who weren't 100% confident when this first came around :b

[Erneuert]

So basically, so far out of all of this, we have one new instance of TR saying “only” that isn’t available anywhere else?

So does that mean Good Day, etc, could still be legit tracks we haven’t heard? And that Home demo?