 I’ve always done things a little differently. I used to make Airfix models as a kid and having assembled my Messerschmitt Bf 109 – and only stuck my fingers to the chassis twice – I turned over the box to regard the options for painting. The first, and most prevalent, was perfect for duelling Spitfires over the Channel. Ducking and diving, trying to get a bead on the plucky Allied pilot and take them down. Cool. Or…there was option B, painted in the colours of Rommel’s desert campaign. No cloud cover, prime real estate for a fighter plane. Two choices, what to do? Option 3. Some batshit crazy paint scheme that exists only in the twisted synapses of my brain, some weird blend of the two, but with extra cool stuff. Option 3. It was always option 3. In many regards, it was the same when I was getting into music. I would seek out an album to find my way in, yet time and time again, I’d eschew the popular and pick the outsider. Option 3 as it were. The first Pop Will Eat Itself album I ever bought was their live album, ‘At Weird’s Bar and Grill’. Slipknot, was ‘Iowa’, Green Day was ‘Kerplunk’. Time and time again, the first crack I’d give a band was one of their odd albums, which most fans would put towards the bottom of their list. The same applies with Nine Inch Nails. When Alex asked what album I wanted, I knew which one I hoped was still free. As I saw him type on Messenger, no doubt informing me that The Fragile, Downward Spiral and With Teeth had already gone, I replied with four words. Further. Down. The. Spiral. There are a number of reasons why this album stands out for me, both musically and personally. Before I delve into the tracks, I’ll paint a picture of where I was in my life when I heard the (quite frankly bonkers) opening track. I’m twenty years old, have just landed my first proper full-time job, sending bits of paper out for a financial company in Salisbury, the city of my birth. I’ve literally been living there for a month and I’m in a crappy bedsit above an art gallery at the bottom of Brown Street. Life is pretty shit…not wanting to put a downer on it, but at that moment in time, life is sucking the sweaty balls of an obese person who has been doing squats for two hours straight. I’ve just split up with my first ever proper girlfriend, am living twenty odd miles away from my chums, in a tiny L-shaped room that contains all my worldly possessions. On Friday nights, there is a guy I bump into in the shared kitchen who makes chip butties with bread that is lined by green mould. He eats it, telling me in his Irish brogue, “Ma said that the green bits are the dessert part of the meal.” Of course it is. Little wonder I keep an eye on him to make sure the drunk motherfucker doesn’t pass out and set fire to us all. Aside from the odd trip home to see people – I was still not on speaking terms with my parents after a rather fractious leaving home, music was pretty much all I had. Sure, in six months, life would turn around and I’d be in better digs, but right then? It was all way too much for me. Coupled with all of that, I was still getting to grips with my mental state, and though I’d dealt with the more extreme urges of my personality, I was still fighting my brain every day to keep myself above water. It was a struggle, and again, Future-Me would love nothing more than to have left me a note telling Old-Me that it would be okay, that I’d find a way to be able to control the things that I worried every day would push me over the edge. This album, this fucking album…it sums up perfectly that moment in my life. It’s a snapshot of the turmoil I was going through in my head. I’d heard of Nine Inch Nails for years, but with a list of bands as long as time itself that I wanted to get into, it took me some time to get to them. The fact that it’s a remix album matters not one jot. Further Down The Spiral cranks into life with ‘Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)’, which lulls you in gently, before smashing you in the face with break beats and a churning maelstrom of industrial drums and chugging riffs. Bear in mind, I’d never even heard The Downward Spiral by this point, so had no point of reference. But with the benefit of hindsight, I find Trent’s vocals on this, and most of the other songs, way clearer than the album they’re pulled from. ‘Piggy’ just builds and builds, dropping off for a temporary respite, before that last final assault. In that tiny dingy room, it was filled with those crunching guitars and nasty ass drums, before finally petering out with that wonderful little sample. The next two tracks are essentially the same song, but oh so very different. Even listening to them now, puts me right back to where I was then. The first, ‘The Art Of Self Destruction, Part One’, is a claustrophobic affair. The lyrics are literal whispers through the speakers straight into your brain. “I am the voice in your head,” like, seriously, no shit. It’s insidious, the way it expands into every part of your skull, the sinister, “I control you,” said over and over again, simultaneously a promise and a status report. It’s the 1984 of songs. As you relax into it, give yourself to it, the tempo cranks up, the beat becomes discordant, the ordered opening gives way to chaos, to opposing thoughts and ideas. It breaks perfectly into, ‘Self Destruction, Part Three’. This is the mania to the depression from the previous song. It just doesn’t let you settle. Always on the move, twisting, turning, pushing you this way and that, dropping you off only so it can deliver its sermon, before the now eerie, “I control you,” becomes a fact. It’s not up for debate any more, you’re pulled with it. And then, BOOM. The adrenaline leaves you, and you’re deposited in a near-empty soundscape. Catching your breath, you can feel it building again. Pressing against the bone of your skull, and sure enough, it bursts back into life once more, the urgency and insistence is all-pervading, stripping you of the ability to do what you want. ‘Heresy (Version)’, is a blessed relief after the rollercoaster you’ve been exposed to so far, far more clinical and industrial in tone. If you stripped the vocals out, it could almost be a Rammstein song. A thunderous march from the bipolar beginning into the more stable middle part of the album. To be honest, you need it, I need it. ‘The Downward Spiral (The Bottom)’, takes it down a notch, haunting, aching, breathless, before descending into a techno blip-blop-blop which sets you up for what comes next. You know what’s coming up, don’t you? Were you ready that first time? ‘Hurt (Live)’, is a song that once you hear, breaks you down into your constituent parts and leaves you there for some considerable time. If ever there was a song that summed up how I felt right there and then, it’s this, and I know I wasn’t the only one. Today, people have the debate about which version is better, this one or Johnny Cash’s. For me, as good as The Man In Black’s version is - and it is a belter - it pales next to this version. It’s raw, it’s breaking inside of you, it starts off kinda clunky, let’s be honest, but dear god…the crowd quietens and Reznor starts to sing. The music blooms as you get to that first chorus, building, building…you can feel it swell inside of you. Fingernails digging into the palms of your hands, teeth gritted, everything inside of you focused on those damn fucking words. For me, it’s the best thing he ever wrote, it’s the sum of everything he aspired to in his early work. Stripped back, without any of the layers of noise you normally associate with NIN, this simple song is the soundtrack for those emotions that threaten to overwhelm you. Yet, it offers hope as much as it envelops suffering. Sure, it’s not your atypical, “let’s get a cup of tea and everything will be fine,” but you don’t want it that way. I didn’t at least. ‘Hurt’, leaves you bent over, broken, but knowing that the past is just a guide of where you’ve been, not of where you’re going. Jesus, I went down a rabbit hole there. Hope you’re still with me? You are? Good work! Honestly, that song is in my top three of all-time, and if any of you have any firm thoughts on it, let me know. I’ll even debate which version is better if you want. *insert smiley face* With most albums, I’d put them on before going to work, or heading out in the evening for beer, so the back end of albums never really got that much attention, this one included. But, when you have four tracks in the first six that have tested your serotonin levels, you need a break. ‘At The Heart Of It All’, definitely gives you that, letting you compose yourself after the emotional tide you’ve ridden to this point. You don’t really think too much about it at the time, but later on when you read up about it, it is kinds odd that a song that NIN didn’t actually do is on here at all. But hey! It’s Aphex Twin, so you can’t complain. It’s like finding a bonus box of Christmas sweets at the back of the cupboard in February. ‘Ruiner (Version)’, unlike most of the songs, is quite one-dimensional, rarely dropping too low, or changing too much in tone and feeling. If anything, you’d kinda feel that with this up front ahead of ‘Piggy’ - especially given the last line, “nothing can stop me now” - might have made better use of it. ‘Eraser (Denial; Realization)’, is another that is perfect for background noise, but personally doesn’t do a great deal. It’s the classic remix song, where you end up playing the original and realising that there isn’t much you could do to make it better. It does chug along quite nicely, and the final third plays on the twisted psyche feel that this album really manages to do so well. There were a number of different versions of the album, and the UK one ends up with ‘Self Destruction, Final’, which pulls in all of the elements from those that have been before. It isn’t a patch on the two earlier versions, instead blending the two together. To me it feels an unnecessary inclusion, especially given what else they could have used from the album they were remixing. Familiar loops play, and whilst it’s not terrible, it just feels like déjà vu. Remix albums go two ways, they either offer you something wonderfully different, PWEI’s ‘Two Fingers My Friends’, is a good example, whilst others are just a waste of time, a shameless cash-grab. This is definitely in the former, as when I finally picked up ‘The Downward Spiral’ a few years later, although I enjoyed it, I found that a number of the songs seemed more distinct and purposeful on this album. Piggy, Self Destruction, and of course Hurt are the obvious ones, but I guess that is also the benefit of such a venture. A big thanks to Alex for asking me to be a part of this. It had been a few years since I’d listened to this album from start to finish, and it really has not lost the impact that it had on me all those years ago. Sometimes, you need to put it away for a little while. Because some things leave an indelible mark, and remind you of times that, although long gone, could return at any moment. All you can hope to have in life are the things you truly love, music for me, is one of those. Cheers. ABOUT DUNCAN P. BRADSHAW Since 2014, Duncan P. Bradshaw has been quite merrily teabagging the boundaries between genre fiction. Having gone through an early period of writing about the undead and other random thoughts, he has now entered his GoreCom phase, having settled on his style; a mix of horror, comedy and bizarro. You can expect blood, guts, bodily secretions and maybe, if you're lucky, a few hearty guffaws along the way. Check out the first GoreCom book, MR SUCKY, the only book about a murderous vacuum cleaner. Keep your eye out for CANNIBAL NUNS FROM OUTER SPACE! which is released in the summer of 2019. His zombie short story collection, CHUMP, was nominated for a Saboteur Award in 2017. In addition, he has had short stories published in a variety of anthologies, and shared pages with some of the leading lights in genre fiction. Check out his website http://duncanpbradshaw.co.uk/ or follow him on that there Facebook do stop by and say hello, its good to talk to real humans. 'Bradshaw always walks his very own path, there's no one else out there writing anything remotely similar to the stuff he thinks up...if Dostoyevsky is the Rembrandt of the literary world, then Bradshaw is surely the Andy Warhol.' - DLS Reviews Cannibal Nuns from Outer Space! The summer blockbuster book! Probably. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of cake, and exclusive access to the church’s stockpile of holy weapons, the Order of the Crimson Rosary are on the frontline in the eternal war between good and evil. Whether it’s repelling demonic possession, judging the authenticity of supposed miracles or having the final say on the colour of bunting at church fetes, the organisation's members sacrifice their own freedom to keep the world safe. Father Flynn, the top operative in the UK, has been responsible for a number of recent high profile gaffs. Given an ultimatum, he must choose between returning to his old job of preserving the last microfiche machine in the church’s library, or submit himself for rehabilitation. Yet evil doesn’t take a ticket and wait in line, as the dreaded cannibal nuns from outer space land to begin their annual harvest. Can Flynn get himself sober enough to repel their evil machinations? Or will another idyllic British village become the nun’s latest buffet? One thing’s for certain, to beat them, Father Flynn is going to have to kick the habit. Book two in the GoreCom series, this time it's highly trained priests facing off against the titular cannibal nuns from outer space. Can the finest Crimson Rosary operatives in the UK thwart the nefarious plan to reduce another population centre to compote?    Comments are closed.
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