Not so long ago Trent Reznor released an album titled "Year Zero." It sucks. I've known hardened NIN fans who bought it and listened to it out of a feeling of obligation, but threw a fit when someone threatened to play the album a second time. I keep on trying to listen to it, not believing that the man responsible for Pretty Hate Machine and Downward Spiral could possibly have made something absolutely valueless.
I have asked the internet, and what I have found is a lot of fan crap. Trent still has fans! Can you believe it? The most shocking thing is the complete silence from the betrayed fandom. We're all in quiet denial at what has happened.
There's also a lot of commentary from Trent about how he's doing something different with the music, and there is deeper meaning to the lyrics. By which he apparently means that there are hidden URLs for a shallow pop tripe version of 1984 embedded into all of the paraphrenalia. Wow, how original! Maybe he is introducing a new generation of retards to 1984, but not all of his fans are retards.
So I've been listening to it, and what strikes me is how absolutely amateuurish it is. If you pay attention to electronica, you will notice that most songs consist of a series of loops that are stacked in various combinations to make a song that progresses. You can hear it clearly when a song begins with a bass line, then a drum line is added, then a noise track, then melody and lyrics.
The difference, what makes Year Zero unique, is that Year Zero never changes any of these loops throughout the song. The drum and bass and noise loops that are introduced at the beginning of the song play unchanged throughout the whole track. If Trent whispers the first word of the song, he will be whispering all the way through. If he yells the first word, it'll be yelling until the end. The closest any song comes to developing from beginning to end is a couple chord changes in the rhythm guitar.
Contrast that to Pretty Hate Machine. The typical track there begins with a set of drum/bass/noise loops in the introduction, but then when the actual song starts all of those loops are stopped and new thematically related ones are introduced. Then as the song progresses through refrain and verse these loops are interchanged so as to create a texture that changes over time.
In your typical track off of PHM, there will be three or four variations on the bass loop, a few variations on the noise loop, several different singing styles, and so on. On Year Zero, there is only one of each loop and it never changes throughout the whole song. It feels like you could do a simple numerical analysis and find that there are a total of 100 unique samples in a PHM track but only 10 in a Year Zero track. To say that he's phoning it in would be to dramatically overstate the amount of effort invested into Year Zero.
So could someone please explain to me what happened here and why Trent Reznor now produces tracks with about the same musical sophistication as my own work.