Nine Inch Nails - The Slip (2008)
Nine Inch Nails - The Slip (2008)
Written by Phil Sunday, 15 June 2008 20:51
Nine Inch Nails - The Slip (2008)
Price paid £0 from theslip.nin.com.
If all music was free? I wouldn’t have any complaints paying for music if it was all this good. A brief look into Halo Twenty-seven; The Slip, an album so good I might even consider buying it! This is different to what they've released before, despite being their shortest album to date it's definitely one of their best. There are aspects of Year Zero, With Teeth, and still some of the old magic of Pretty Hate Machine.
Presentation:
Somewhat cryptic album art being a staple of Trent's releases, The Slip takes this to an even more confusing level. There's a page of art for each song. Some of these are cleverly formatted ways of writing the songs (999,999 and 1,000,000), others are symbolic patterns depicting the song titles (Lights in the Sky, Corona Radiata, The Four of Us Are Dying) with the rest being just seemingly random geometric patterns. My favourite however is Demon Seed; unlike the vast grey pages with monotone shapes this uses a vivid red background with a black shape coloured in white as if that is the seed with a black flower emanating upwards out of the red earth. Overall a very minimalistic theme, but it really suits the style of music, and the theme of the album, definitely one of the best presented digital releases I've seen. It is all contained in a PDF file.
Music:
A move away from the old style of Pretty Hate Machine and The Fragile, but With Teeth being my favourite Nine Inch Nails album, I really enjoy the whole feel of the album. 999,999 is an introduction track of just less than a minute and a half which builds up in the trademark Nine Inch Nails fashion to seamlessly slip into the song 1,000,000. Letting You is more akin to Year Zero than the other songs of the album, mixing the standard Nine Inch Nails sound with harsh noise samples. Discipline is one of the highlights of the album, another classic like The Hand That Feeds which will definitely receive radio play. Echoplex is a slightly slower and calmer song but still a very strong effort. The next song, Head Down, is my favourite and has some of the best lyrics of the album, "This is all a dream / and none of you are real". Lights in the Sky slows down the album with a piano themed trudge into Corona Radiata, nearly eight minutes long and an instrumental track that starts as an intermission and ends at the introduction to The Four of Us are Dying. This track picks up the pace a bit but the second half of the album is still definitely the slower, the album finally closes with Demon Seed, which slowly builds up again and is definitely up there as one of the best songs of the album.
Medium:
Unlike Radiohead who released an album for a "chosen amount to be paid", knowing that they will release a hard copy for the usual painful price of £13.99 to ensure that there is no risk involved, Trent seems to have really tried to change the music industry and the business model of releasing an album. Ghosts I-IV being a start and The Slip a greater progression, Trent used his own record label, did not promote the album at all and did not even suggest that there will be a non-digital release of the album. There was not even an attempt to ask for money or to release only a preview.
There's slightly fewer options to download The Slip in, Ghosts was released in nearly every digital format conceived of, whilst The Slip is available in the following formats, all entirely free of DRM:
V0 LAME encoded MP3 (87MB),
FLAC at CD quality (259MB),
FLAC HD audio 24bit 96kHZ (942MB),
M4A lossless (263MB),
WAVE HD audio 24bit 96kHZ (1.5GB).
It's also been released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike licence, with the only instructions being to "remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers...", the multi-tracks of the original recordings of the songs have also been released on remix.nin.com to allow fans to remix to their heart's content, and hope that they are noticed like the tracks on the previous year's Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D.
Summary:
Price: Free
Location: theslip.nin.com exclusive
Presentation: 8/10
Music: 8/10
Medium: 10/10
Trent seems to be in a frenzy, releasing another album within two months of the last, this is definitely not the same Trent taking 4 years at a time, and this is definitely not like the old Pretty Hate Machine and Broken Trent, it's a return to the With Teeth style era, after the deviation that was Year Zero. The presentation is intriguing and artistically brilliant. A revolution for the music industry possibly, but definitely a landmark in the way that it is released and marketed. It may not be all Nine Inch Nails’ fans cup of tea, but it's definitely served with a silver spoon and in the most royal of china.
Overall: 9/10
