Originally Posted by
Sesquipedalism
I'm going to have to listen to it in FLAC, and I'll want to read the lyrics. But at the moment I'm as shocked as anyone. And my gut reaction is a sort of dislikethe same sort of feeling I had for The Decemberists' The King Is Dead: This is just fine, but it's not what I come to this band for. Which is to say, I wouldn't go to Arby's and bitch about the broiled fish they served that day. I've never bought a bottle of scotch and complained it wasn't tequila, but I would be vaguely disappointed if I bought a bottle of scotch and found it only contained plain Irish whiskey. If y'all catch my drift. I'm confused and not as initially ecstatic as I was with "Copy of A." But I don't hate it.
EDIT: I should actually also mention here that, once I figured out what it was supposed to be, so to speak, I came to quite like The King Is Dead. The artist challenged me by doing something relatively unpredictable and once I caught up, it turned out to be something totally respectable even if it wasn't my personal favorite composition.
And, for whomever it was who said we heard this out of context of the album, I think that's probably a sensible thing to keep in mind. It might be worth noting that, assuming "The Eater of Dreams" and "Black Noise" are intro/outro instrumentals and everything else is a vocal track, this is the shortest song on the album, and in its dead center. I honestly don't see Trent releasing what would, in critical analysis terms, be called a comedy (i.e., Merchant of Venice is technically a comedy because everything ends just wonderfully even though it's kind of grisly and bleak in a number of places and doesn't smack of the Jim Carrey shit most people associate with the word "comedy"), I suspect this might be a wonderful contrapuntal eye of the storm type thing. I haven't heard "Disappointed," but sandwiched between something that sounds so positively upbeat as that and something more sour and lonely (which a song called "Satellite" could very well be), it might not be one's favorite Nine Inch Nails song, but it might serve a damned good purpose. Or I could be totally wrong. The song titles before "Everything" seem much more undeniably bleak than the ones after it. So, maybe it will be an LP that ends happily. Which in itself would be an interesting idea to close out the Nine Inch Nails career.
Of course, I'm going on nothing but pulled-from-ass speculation, a very basic idea of dramatic structure, what I know of the way Trent seems to like to structure things, and a number of single-word song titles here.
For all we know, maybe he wrote it as a big "fuck you" to Interscope for that Greatest Hits LP. Like "Cocksucker Blues." "Yeah, Interscope, I've got your new track right here, assholes. Enjoy it. The kids over at the Death Cab for Cutie camp said it was a bit too chipper." However, I doubt that. And suspect that, given a little while, I'll like it just fine. It may never be "And All That Could Have Been" in my book but, hell, I genuinely enjoy "Maybe Just Once" and "Purest Feeling." And it's neat to see Trent do something that's really ballsy considering his fanbase. An album with no guitars, or no synth, or no layers, or live drums might all be different, but none of them inherently defy pretty much everything his long-time devotees have come to see as sine qua non of Nine Inch Nails. Something earnest and possibly even optimistic is maybe the biggest risk he could take with the audience he's got.
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