I THINK MY BRAIN IS FULL

Ghosts I - Nine Inch Nails. I’m going to just come right out and say this: Trent Reznor is a pretentious pervert twat. There we go, any last Emos that might be reading the site have just packed up their diamond-encrusted self-harm sets, provided by their psychoanalyst parents and fucked off. Good times. After the tedious, long-winded nonsense of The Downward Spiral, I’ve pretty much ignored Nine Inch Nails’ output and got on with my life. Pretty Hate Machine was a bland album, but the Broken and Fixed EPs were quite good, in places. Fixed could be described (look, I’m doing it now) as an example of what we now know as Breakcore and pounded my head for a couple of months, many years ago. However, after that, the Spiral album was just trite, contrived, semi-industrial, self-indulgent wank-rock, put out by a man that does a great act of being affected, twisted and weird. It’s all pretention and it’s all caused by too many rubbish drugs.

His pretention has reached critical mass with the four volume Ghosts (I-IV), a collection of 36 instrumentals. These are available via the internet, at a sliding price scale. I’ve only got volume I to review, as I refuse to pay money for it. You can only have the first volume if you’re a blackhearted freeloader like myself. I’m assuming that all of the good tracks are on volumes II-IV, as everything on volume I is dull and boring. As you’ve probably come to expect from Reznor by now, it’s a lot of clicks, pops and distortion, with some electro-drums thrown in. There are a lot of bands that are doing what he’s doing, only they’re doing it much better, probably inspired by his earlier works, to some degree or another.

Perhaps what I mean to say is that this album is so incredibly dated and out-of-whack with contemporary examples of this particular type of music, that it bores me to tears. At one point, track 3 (they don’t appear to have any track names, just numbers) sounded like it was about to lurch into a really good track. There was a flash of awesome bassline that dissipated into the air, never to be heard again. To put it in the simplest terms, Ghosts, or what I’ve heard of it, seems to be 36 tracks of sombre pianos, distorted bass and an ever present feeling of licking the crumbs up off the cutting room floor. To put it in even simpler than the simplest terms: This sounds like an album full of stuff that Reznor never quite finished. Whilst it is said that the album was recorded in 2007, I get a feeling it’s just a load of stuff he’s had sitting on a hard drive for the last ten years.

If I had a star rating system, it would be out of 5. Ghosts would get a less than fair 1, as I can only rate what I’ve heard. And there’s very little chance that I’m going to fork over $5 for 27 more tracks and a PDF.

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