Rating: 5 out of 6 stars

Interscope; 2007

Nine Inch Nail’s fifth full album entitled Year Zero (Halo 24) gave me a shock that had nothing to do with Trent Reznor’s often hostile lyrics. It’s not the coolest thing I have ever seen, but on that day, it made me do a quadruple-take: on release day I put the disc into my car stereo as a black CD, and when I arrived home and ejected the disc, it had turned mostly white. What was left over was bits of binary code and other bits of ‘digital’-looking imagery. This almost thoroughly boring anecdote is meant to illustrate that even after 19 year of existence, Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails is still trying its best to surprise and be innovative with their fans. And, this is quite evident in the music itself of Year Zero.

As a concept album, Reznor describes it thus:

“What’s it about? Well, it takes place about fifteen years in the future. Things are not good. If you imagine a world where greed and power continue to run their likely course, you’ll have an idea of the backdrop. The world has reached the breaking point – politically, spiritually and ecologically. Written from various perspectives of people in this world, ‘year zero’ examines various viewpoints set against an impending moment of truth.“

Picking up where it left off sonically on With Teeth, NIN continues with the distorted analog synth sound. This time around, however, Reznor says that much of the CD itself is improvised. One can guess that tracks such as “Vessel” (one of my faves), “My Violent Heart,” and “The Great Destroyer” are among the songs with improvisation, and it lives up to the excitement that they display when they do this on stage (if you haven’t seen them live, check out the highly enjoyable And All That Could Have Been and Beside You In Time live performances). Radio listeners will be familiar with “Survivalism” and the funky “Capital G,” both politico-religious “viewpoints” that take on the critique of a fascist state and what happens when Christians think that their saviour is capitalism and power.

Perhaps the only complaints I have with this album are the songs “The Warning”, the end of the album itself, and perhaps surprisingly in these bizarre times, the concept itself. “The Warning” repeats “Your time is tick, tick, ticking away,” which has a tendency to be too reminiscent of The Fragile’s similarly repetitive “Into the Void” where Reznor chimes, “Tried to save myself, but my self keeps slipping away…” The end of the album closes with “Zero-Sum” which mourns the loss of all things as the digital age takes over with assimilating everything into one’s and zero’s. Perhaps I am just disappointed with it as a closing track in light of Reznor’s magnificent “Hurt” (The Downward Spiral), “The Great Below” (The Fragile), and With Teeth’s ‘Beside You in Time” and “Right Where It Belongs” double-closing feel.

As for the concept, it does not take much guess work to realize where Reznor is going when you open the CD and on the left you see a hand holding a Bible and as the right flap opens up you see another arm holding a machine gun. It is quite understandable these days to want to equate plenty of religiosity with violence–especially theo-fascist tendencies of Christian dominionists–but this is really a kind of sloppy argument, especially in light of all the execrable polemics of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, and now Christopher Hitchens on the scene of atheist fundamentalists. It makes for good secular “apocalypticism,” but that is about it. There is really very little nuance in these histories of faith (although many could be cited, for starters see Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins latest).

Despite these minor quibbles, the album is an immensely enjoyable listen. The radio-funky “Capital G,” the forboding “God Given,” and the punching “Vessel” stand out as highlights on this disc. There is even an ambient track (“Another Version of the Truth”) which follows the distorted mayhem of “The Great Destroyer,” hearkening back to the welcome come down of “A Warm Place” following “Big Man With a Gun” from The Downward Spiral. I would definitely recommend putting this album on repeat for a few hours.