 Things Falling Apart occupies a strange place, best experienced outside of context, as a phenomena unto itself, in the isolation of one's own thoughts, where the music can carry us to wherever and whatever states it wills. There's little in all of human creative endeavour more viscerally emotive than music. It has been variously described in psychological and mythological terms as the highest form of art (so because, unlike almost every other form of creative expression, it does not require context or wider interpretation in order to evoke emotion or spark reaction), as the secret language of creation itself (various traditional and fantasy mythologies describe creation itself being sung into being, the secret rhythms of reality taking the form of a music beyond human comprehension, that our own pluckings and warblings are but pale echoes of). The very best examples tap into that factor, acknowledge and reflect it, providing an experience that is ineffable and emotive, that evokes wider context without imposing or enshrining it. Nine Inch Nails, with their grimy, industrial, suburban ethos, the impressions their music evokes of skittering on the edge of fractured and bleeding reality, are a prime example: their work generally schizophrenic and discordant, the sounds of breaking down machinery and shattering windows, the screams of damned human beings being mercilessly fed into ancient, metaphysical engines, their very, very finest work not only reflects certain cultural phenomena (they are very much of the school that taps into lost and disenfranchised youth, the celebration of apocalypse and the tearing down of established orders, systems and institutions) but also serves as a means of inspiring worlds: Closing one's eyes and listening to, for example, the likes of The Fragile can be an experience as transcendental and hallucinatory as flying on certain narcotics (another factor that NIN's music deliberately taps into). They are, unlike most of the popular and mainstream music they clearly despise, not a communal experience; their work intended for the lost and isoalted, to be listened to in darkened bedrooms and basements, away from light, away from the eyes of every day humanity. It is a celebration of the monstrous, the outside, the outre. In that, it conjures nightmares and hellscapes: vast, industrial ruins and science fiction plains of alien, living flesh married to H.R. Giger bio-mechanisms, dystopias in which humanity is married to its engines in a manner that dissolves any definition between the two, and leaves all of creation little more than a seeping, grinding, impossibly elaborate mechanism, a grim, impotent god-machine that can never be free of itself or know its original intention. Their work evokes story and mythology and particular states of lucid psychology that allows the listener to delve deep down, to pare away the septums that separate us from our sublimated layers of consciousness and dream whilst partially awake. In that, the year 2000 remix album, Things Falling Apart, becomes almost ironic by nature of its very existence: Originally released to critical desolation, the album boasts little in the way of new work, but takes existing tracks and subjects them to a Frankensteinian process of tearing apart and restructuring: some are hardly changed at all from their original incarnations, merely flourished with an extra layer of bass or back-beat, their tempo increased or slowed to a graveyard crawl, whereas others are shredded to tatters before being pieced back together in forms that are barely recognisable. Given the counter-culture, anti-establishment roots of the band itself, one might argue that the very existence of a “remix album” is a cynical example of hypocrisy, an entirely commercialised endeavour that was likely decided more by boardroom than by band meeting. And that isn't entirely unfair when one sits down to listen to the album, but nor is it the entire story: If one is unfamiliar with NIN and the particular musical sub-cultures in which they operate, then one might be forgiven for being captivated by the grinding, industrial nihilism of tracks like The Wretched, bleakly entranced by the child-like isolation and loneliness of Where is Everybody? Given that the album largely consists of tracks that are already familiar, that already have their places and contexts within the band's back-catalogue, it's hardly surprising that they remain as evocative and visceral as they ever were (even in their altered forms). I can still listen to the likes of The Great Collapse and envision great, polluted waves rising over grimy, industrial towers and murky suburbs, chemical seas sweeping in to wash away the filth of humanity for new and awful forms of life to arise. I can still hear the engines that churn behind waking reality, that give rise to both genesis and apocalypse, that have been breaking down for aeons, whose entropy NIN's work reflects. I can hear the Lovercraftian horrors whispering and singing through the veil of reality worn hideously thin, pouring their mad dreams, their lunatic visions, into the minds of humanity. I can listen to The Frail and feel a mind breaking down, a once brilliant genius dissolving into a mire of dementia and confusion. I can see the old man in his chair, perhaps twitching as malfunctioning augmetics and engines attempt to keep him alive while the world outside rots and grows ever more infested. I can see the wheels turning, the half-flesh, half-machine contraptions turning, swelling, billowing, the old man begging, begging to be put out of his misery, allowed to die with what little dignity, what little humanity, he has left. I can listen to the Charlie Clouser remix of Starfuckers and feel the cold expanse of oblivion stretching endlessly all around, the light of dead stars on my naked body as something swirls in the dark, something vaster than stars or worlds or nebulae hurtling towards me, growing more maddening and elaborate with every beat of its multiple wings. By contrast, the Dave Ogilvie remix of the same track is the screaming, discordant hymn of a prisoner, a sentience stripped of its original form and identity, sealed within a great engine that it is forced to feed and direct in its functions, a human brain surgically plucked from its skull and wired into an immense computer system as little more than a redundant processing unit, barely able to hold onto its sense of self amidst the millions of others it has become one with. Adrian Sherwood's adaptation is more operatic: a space-opera apocalypse in which an industrialised Earth blooms and billows, great vessels and munitions rising from its surface to fill the sky with fire, to turn surrounding space into a psychedelic inferno, alien ships and those of humanity clashing in lunatic nihilism, not caring if they render the planet below uninhabitable, if they turn space itself into a wasteland. That is where NIN have alway been at their strongest, the manner in which I have always engaged with their music: in its potential for imagery, for evoking mythology, which this album exhibits in characteristic style. However, there is also a hollowness here, a lingering, tinny note of insincerity born by the album's nature as a fairly commercial, corporate exercise. Unlike so much of NIN's work, the album doesn't exist to shudder or unsettle its audience, to approach them almost violently in how starkly different it is from proscribed markets and mainstream works. As such, much of its evocative qualities are dulled, certainly in comparison with previous albums and the work they produced in the earlier years of their career. It doesn't feel as powerful or emotive or traumatic as much of what's gone before. Instead, there is a staidness to it all, a synthetic quality that is difficult to cleanse from the palate, especially given that this was released as a companion to the eminently more sincere and experimental The Fragile. The tracks, whilst maintaining a certain capacity to evoke and inspire, especially in certain altered frames of mind -which the music itself largely reflects-, also have a tendency towards similarity that reduces the experience to an aural soup or mire. There is a thematic indistinction here that is notably absent in many other NIN albums, which can have the quality of making one track bleed into another or become little more than a minor deviation from its siblings. This can make the album feel overdrawn and even slightly wearisome at times, a far cry from the heady emotion of The Fragile or the prog-rock visionary qualities of The Downward Spiral. That said, there is still no denying how powerfully vivid and evocative the album is at its best, the opening track, Slipping Away, establishing a heavily mechanical, dystopian theme from the off, sounding like the interminable pounding of great engines that the later tracks mythologically elaborate upon, the following piece -Where is Everybody?- eliciting an almost cyber-punk element of existential crisis that present-day audiences might associate with the likes of The Gorillaz, most notably Demon Days, which has more than a minor NIN influence. As the backing track for imaginative or meditational exercise, as a phenomena to lose oneself in, there is little like Nine Inch Nails. Even in their less well-regarded moments, there are barbs and embers of emotion, of visceral reaction; images that coalesce unbidden in the audience's mind, leaving them to wonder what unspoken realms the music might lead them to, if they allow it; what forbidden or sacred spaces within themselves they might unlock, should they prove perverse enough. In that, Things Falling Apart occupies a strange place, best experienced outside of context, as a phenomena unto itself, in the isolation of one's own thoughts, where the music can carry us to wherever and whatever states it wills. George Daniel Lea   Comments are closed.
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