Quote Originally Posted by r_z View Post
How do feel about Trents affinity to carefully creating his own narrative each time a new album gets released? :

HM is the TDS anniversary album.
The Slip is the quickly thrown together electronic garage album for him to experiment with business models.
Year Zero is the political record.
With Teeth is the I'm done with drugs record.
etc.
I'd argue there's a difference between what's more or less a thesis statement for an album, and journalists reducing an entire album to a three-sentence biography of Trent Reznor at any given time. Obviously with anything any artist makes, there's some sort of main point/goal in mind when they make it. But I'd totally argue on the anniversary album statement, as Trent said a lot of it was him looking back on that era of his life, and where he is now, and seeing how different he is and yet how he still can connect to that guy he once was, and that's a lot deeper than a "tribute album" to my ears.

Year Zero is a concept album, it has an entire wealth of story and fiction behind it, The Warning has its own comic book basically, it's more sophisticated than simply "the political album."

Overall there's nothing wrong with stating an album's overall focus, but my irritation lies with reviews and journalists that neglect to look at the full product and just latch on to these single statements, or simply say "Well Trent Reznor's life is now this so that means the album is too."

Also, Trent himself has said that every album cycle he ends up having a sort of pre-recorded mental list of answers to the same typical questions. I'd blame his lack of in-depth discussion on a lot of recent albums on a lack of in-depth questions from interviewers. Even in The Fragile era there was this fantastic Japanese interview that asked him heavily about different songs, different actual aspects of the album, brought up the album credits even, and I can't say there's a whole lot of interviews being produced in that vein nowadays.