Miss Piggy Lunchbox

How masturbatory is this 11-track single featuring 10 remixes of three tracks from Nine Inch Nails’ debut Pretty Hate Machine? Consider: Pretty Hate Machine was just under 49 minutes…meanwhile, this “single,” in quotes because it doesn’t even feature the version of “Head Like A Hole” from Pretty Hate Machine, is nearly 57 minutes long. So the number of songs has been reduced by 70% and yet it’s 25% longer. That’s one hell of a jerk-off session for Trent Reznor.

I was pretty into Pretty Hate Machine when it came out, before Reznor revealed with his later work that that was basically all he could do. Nine Inch Nails is fine, but the talent therein is not in the songwriting department, which is shallower than the puddles outside my home, but rather in Reznor’s ability to paste sounds and riffs into broader sonic environments. By stretching his four minute tracks out into seven-minute gauntlets of tedium, Reznor has taken away everything that was once good about these songs.

“Down In It” was never one of my favorite Nine Inch Nails songs, but I had no idea how awful it really was. The three versions here, two of them clocking in at about seven minutes, are worthless, and the remixers of those long two, Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc, need to be punished for their dull, malinspirational creations. The “Terrible Lie” remixes suffer from similar bouts of somnambulence.

About the only thing this disc gets right is making some of the title track remixes sound pretty decent. It leads off with the Slate version, and that’s pretty compelling but spends too long on a dull breakdown that over-emphasizes the annoying “wah wah” distant scream sample. The Clay version avoids this breakdown and, for the most part, that sample, and it starts off with some cool drum sounds, so I’ll even hold on to that one. The Copper version is pretty bad but at least features some cool rhythmic interplacy, and the Soil version is awful, going on for six-and-a-half minutes and spending an unbelievable amount of time on the distant scream sample.

Why Reznor would want to take good but not great songs and suck all the life out of them, or why anybody would want to listen to these zombie tracks, is beyond me. Nine Inch Nails singles: For fans whose favorite part of the albums is the unimaginative monotony.

Rating:

Keepers: “Head Like A Hole (Clay)”
Filed Between: Pretty Hate Machine and Nirvana (Bleach)

Tags: 1.5 lunchboxes, 1990, CD reviews, J-mez' collection, music

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 8:23 am and is filed under CD reviews, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.