2008 Woodie Awards
NIN concept album released
Bart Gottula
Issue date: 5/8/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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Every once in awhile, an album comes along, turns heads and shakes the foundation of the entire music industry.
Trent Reznor and company do it all the time. The founder and core genius behind Nine Inch Nails has produced music that continues to explore new genres and political thought well ahead of its time.
Nine Inch Nails' latest release Year Zero (also known as Halo 24) is a CD that expands on every traditional sense of a "concept album." The album is by far one of the largest undertakings by Reznor and one of the best examples of political insight and musical creativity.
The physical aspects of the album alone are worth the price tag. The CD comes in a bizarre case with no cover writing, but merely a strange image seen through a car window. The CD itself is heat sensitive and changes color from black to white when heated. The CD is also tactile. It has an intricate design of 1s and 0s along with the album information.
The back of the album case then gives fans a taste of Reznor's conceptual art, with a warning from a fictitious "United States Bureau of Morality." Thus begins the journey into a futuristic world where the album is based. Secret Web sites and messages about this world have been spreading across the Internet.
The convergence of the music with latest technological advances and cryptic messages are truly inspiring, but making sense of all the material is another matter.
One thing is for certain, though. The album does do a good job at delighting fans with the band's uniqueness. This CD's content offers a completely new sound, unlike anything on the band's previous release, With Teeth. Fans of The Downward Spiral and The Fragile will be pleased to find that the album is unstructured in a commercial music sense.
"Hyperpower!" opens the album with a melody without lyrics, but with rather edgy guitar riffs and loud drum beats. It sounds as if it's a battle cry prior to combat or possibly the backdrop to a tale of futuristic warfare.
Trent Reznor and company do it all the time. The founder and core genius behind Nine Inch Nails has produced music that continues to explore new genres and political thought well ahead of its time.
Nine Inch Nails' latest release Year Zero (also known as Halo 24) is a CD that expands on every traditional sense of a "concept album." The album is by far one of the largest undertakings by Reznor and one of the best examples of political insight and musical creativity.
The physical aspects of the album alone are worth the price tag. The CD comes in a bizarre case with no cover writing, but merely a strange image seen through a car window. The CD itself is heat sensitive and changes color from black to white when heated. The CD is also tactile. It has an intricate design of 1s and 0s along with the album information.
The back of the album case then gives fans a taste of Reznor's conceptual art, with a warning from a fictitious "United States Bureau of Morality." Thus begins the journey into a futuristic world where the album is based. Secret Web sites and messages about this world have been spreading across the Internet.
The convergence of the music with latest technological advances and cryptic messages are truly inspiring, but making sense of all the material is another matter.
One thing is for certain, though. The album does do a good job at delighting fans with the band's uniqueness. This CD's content offers a completely new sound, unlike anything on the band's previous release, With Teeth. Fans of The Downward Spiral and The Fragile will be pleased to find that the album is unstructured in a commercial music sense.
"Hyperpower!" opens the album with a melody without lyrics, but with rather edgy guitar riffs and loud drum beats. It sounds as if it's a battle cry prior to combat or possibly the backdrop to a tale of futuristic warfare.
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