When I developed the idea of the Nine Inch Nails at 30 project, there were a huge number of albums that I was really looking forward to getting stuck into. And I have to say, in all honesty, Fixed was not high among them. While the precursor piece, Broken, remains an absolute favourite, the remix album that accompanies it doesn't rank highly or live long in the memory among a catalogue of brilliant releases from the band. Just think – next on the slate was The Downward Spiral, an album that truly deserves its reputation as a seminal piece of industrial/alternative music.

Fixed was released relatively quickly after Broken, emerging a mere three months later, which at the least suggests that it was something that was in the works the whole time and was certainly not any kind of cash-in after the success of Broken – in fact that concept wouldn't find the Trent Reznor MO in the least. Despite never hitting the chart heights of its predecessor, Fixed was certified Platinum in the UK (selling over 300,000 copies) and reached a high position of 6 in the Canadian charts. It would  also be the first in a series of remix albums from Nine Inch Nails, which has since offered up Further Down The Spiral, Things Falling Apart, Year Zero Remixed and a slightly more obscure Remix 2014 album that followed on from Hesitation Marks.

While Fixed certainly picks up much stylistically from Broken, I feel that in adding more dance and electronic elements the album somehow loses the raw, furious edge that made it so memorable. It's fair to say that numerous of the tracks have their moments, but many don't really stay with me as song in full. If I had to pin down a favourite I feel like the extended version of Wish – the second track on the album – is a very good one. The opener, Gave Up, has a couple of very engaging sections but overall doesn't feel as though it gels together as a track. On the rest of the album there are two remixes of Happiness in Slavery – which has never been my favourite from the Broken record at the best of times – as well as the decent Throw it Away, which blends elements of Suck and Last in a solid if not spectacular combination. I would imagine that in a different context to sitting at home – say in an industrial/metal club – many of these tracks would go down a treat and have the potential to fill a dancefloor. But as a top to bottom listen I would tend to say this is the least inspired NIN album – not to say that it's bad, but when you set the bar high your work is always going to be compared to your better and your best output. While some fans have shown something of a dislike towards the more recent EPs, each of those I feel has substantially more highpoints than this one.

While Broken retains an elements of freshness due to the fury that seems to drip from every note, Fixed does feel firmly like a product of the nineties. Maybe the lustre has just fallen off this one slightly over time –  I remember the remix album still being a thing of excitement when they were first released. It could even be that maybe the content of Broken is less suitable for remixing, with less different and varied elements to pull upon that NIN's next two albums, which served to propel them from stardom to megastardom. If there are more exciting elements of the music to pull at in the first place, you're liable to have a better remix album all around.

If you're new to NIN, I certainly wouldn't suggest starting here – as I say, it's still a good 6.5 or 7 out of 10, but that makes it for me the weakest of thirty years of output. If you want an intro to the band, there's plenty that's worth a 9 or even a 10 out of 10 that I'd suggest going with first. Ultimately Fixed might be rather more an album for the aficionado than the casual fan.

Next time around, it'll be time for The Downward Spiral...
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Having made an almighty impact with their debut album Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails were a band that produced some of their most famous work – and indeed a number of their bestselling albums – throughout the 90s. Pretty Hate Machine was a platinum album in its own right, but even that would pale in comparison to the incredible success of The Downward Spiral and The Fragile to come.

But before all that, we had the first of a number of EPs that would emerge from the NIN stable, Broken. This one emerged three year’s after the band’s debut, coming in 1992 after an extended feud and continued legal battle with TVT. The crux of the matter was that TVT wanted an album more like Pretty Hate Machine, with the hope that it would produce a number of successful singles in the vein of Head Like a Hole. However Trent Reznor was keen to get away from that sound, and objected to the ‘synth-pop’ label that TVT was attempting to apply to the band. The album was recorded largely in secret to avoid record company interference, and finally emerged in 1992 as a hybrid co-release of Interscope, TVT and Nothing Records – a label Reznor set up with John Malm Jr that ran until 2007.

To say this was a departure from the 80’s friendly Pretty Hate Machine would be an understatement. As a teenager growing up through the 90’s, Nine Inch Nails kind of perfectly captured the directionless anger that myself and many of my friends were feeling at the time. I did come to it a few years after its initial release, but even now it holds a lot of power as a slice of pure, inchoate rage that you can’t help but feel energised when you listen to. For many fans it sits alongside the band’s very best work, and is undoubtedly the most consistently heavy release, with its genre typically being marked as industrial metal. There’s no Something I Can Never Have, Hurt or Right Where it Belongs to alleviate the brutality here. It’s easy to argue that this is an album that bottles all of Reznor’s frustrations at the time, and maybe that kind of emotional rawness is what has kept it a special place in the heart of many NIN fans.

We kick off with a short introductory track in the shape of ‘Pinion’ – this short, disjointed lead song has arguably become something of a trademark for the band since this album – before we launch into the furious double-header of ‘Wish’ and ‘Last’, which feel like an absolute slap in the face to truly demand your attention. The elements of electronica are still in there, but backed up in both cases by meaty guitar riffs that embody far more of a 90’s sound. Both remain live favourites to this day, and it’s easy to see why – they’re absolutely bound to get a crowd pumped up and into things live.

Those two are followed by ‘Help Me I Am In Hell’ – another lyricless track that provides a sort of bridge between slices of heaviness – before ‘Happiness in Slavery’, another angst-filled metal track that really captured the feel of the times and the generation that was listening to it. ‘Gave Up’ and ‘Suck’ are two further classic towards the end of this album, with probably my least favourite track of the album – a cover of Adam and The Ants’ ‘Physical’ wedged inbetween. Although the album only runs to thirty minutes, it somehow feels much more epic and meaningful than you might expect, and it’s fair to say it made an impression at the time, with reviews employing words such as ‘vicious’ ‘rabid’, ‘nihilistic’, and ‘shocking’. I feel those fit the bill pretty well.

It’s also hard to let this review pass without a mention of the notorious music videos, which made up a short proto-snuff horror film that stirred controversy time and time again. Numerous of the individual videos were banned, or had to have alternative versions made to accommodate censors, and a full version of the film remains an incredibly elusive thing to find. The whole thing has never been officially released, with Reznor apparently worried that the videos could take away from the music, so it remains something of a holy grail for fans of the band.

Overall, Broken sees a very different Nine Inch Nails from the one the emerged in 1992, and to me remains one of the most lively and energetic metal albums around, one I often turn to when I’m feeling a bubbling rage at something or other. It doesn’t always cure it, but it’s nice to know somebody feels the same. This type of aggressive blast would be seen in bits and pieces in future records, but never as consistently as here.

Next up we’ll be taking a look at one of the many Nine Inch Nails remix albums, 1993’s Fixed.