Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Nine Inch Nails :: "Survivalism"From Year Zero (Interscope; 2007)
People get old. I have -- last night I watched some drunk kids crowdsurfing and thought to myself, I remember those days. I remember crowdsurfing. I’m not in high school, and so I didn’t launch myself on to the outstretched, leather-wrapped hands of the drunk emo kids in front of me. (The Thermals draw a weird crowd.)
But were Trent Reznor at the Beachland last night, he would’ve been that kid that keeps on clasping his hands together to random people, offering to “help them up,” and then later, when he’d land from his own rides atop the crowd, would shake his head amazedly, all, “Phew! Great rush!” and then shove me into someone. On “Survivalism” we hear the artist as an out-of-touch fogey. Oh, Trent. If you’re going to continue inelastically within the boundaries of a decades-old genre, wearing increasingly ill-fitting clothes and doing it all with a straighter and straighter face, at least have started with a template as deep and old as the ocean, like, say, Neil Young. Aggro-dance-thrash doesn’t sound as convincing coming from a 50-year-old as rustic outsider rock. And, okay, so Reznor’s only 43, but he’s still regressing in sound, topic and song titles. “March of the Pigs” = notebook classic! “Starfuckers, Inc.” = deliciously nasty! “Survivalism” = b-side, or maybe a remix subheading (like, “Nowhereface [Survivalism Remix]”).
Which isn’t to say that “Survivalism” is a shitty song, because some of the burbles and synth-slits sound okay, frothing nicely before the chorus, which itself contains a neat little upward tug toward the end of each line. But while these are nice, the track has the feel of variations on a theme: the guitars and vocals still dominate the mix, and they could as easily be lifted from Pretty Hate Machine (1989) as from, well, whatever the fuck Trent’s claiming inspired this newest record (LCD Soundsystem, again?). But it’s the same old bag of sounds, in the end, which is, of course, sad. Maturity fit Reznor well; The Fragile (1999) was a good record, really! But since those creaky steps up the staircase toward some metaphysical production nirvana, he’s slid straight down that spiral, and “Survivalism,” with all its affected pubescent surges, sounds something like an earnest musical pedophilia.
Clayton Purdom :: 6 March 2007 |
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