Review of "Nine Inch Nails"

Nine Inch Nails

With Teeth

When the last Nine Inch Nails album of new material came out, Moxy Fruvous was on tour. With that speed of album release, it is hard not to expect every album to be a Downward Spiral-quality masterpiece. This is, of course, wholly unfair, but still somewhat inevitable.

And by those standards, Without Teeth would have to be taken as a complete failure. It has none of the grandeur of The Downward Spiral, nor of The Fragile. What it does have, however, is a sharp as nails (Pardon me) set of well-honed songs, complete with hooks, sharp production, and industrial-influenced bite. The album, in short, is an album with teeth.

Which is, in many ways, all Trent Reznor could have done. He tried to match the splendor of TDS with The Fragile, and fell quite short. His options were to spin his wheels trying again, or to just go back to basics - writing good songs and recording them. And after six years, the failure that wheel-spinning would have represented is, in short, enormous. And so he avoided it. Bravo to him on that.

On the other hand, when one of the most brilliant musicians of the 90s turns in what amounts to an album of pop hooks, no matter how hooky it may be, it is impossible to react without some disappointment.