Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine: 2010 Remaster
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CD Details
Artist: Nine Inch NailsEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Extra tracks, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2010-11-22
Music Label: Bicycle Music Company
Soundtracks:
- Head Like A Hole
- Terrible Lie
- Down In It
- Sanctified
- Something I Can Never Have
- Kinda I Want To
- Sin
- That's What I Get
- The Only Time
- Ringfinger
- Get Down Make Love
Music reviews of Pretty Hate Machine: 2010 Remaster
Music Review: Great album; reissue could have been more comprehensive.
Rating: 4 Stars
Pretty Hate Machine is the soundtrack of an adolescent emotional crisis. I don't just mean that it's loud, angry and self-absorbed. That would hardly be interesting. No, much more than that, it very accurately depicts the feelings and mindset of that time in a person's life. And because Trent Reznor really did make it big by being loud, angry and self-absorbed (on The Downward Spiral, in 1994), it became easy to forget his great writing on his first album.
Musically, The Downward Spiral is superior to Pretty Hate Machine. Actually, Pretty Hate Machine doesn't have all that much music. There is a musical backdrop for Reznor's voice, but it mostly consists of straightforward dance rhythms and some keyboard textures that don't really stand out. Very few songs on the album have stand-alone musical hooks.
But that's fine, because the album is all about Reznor. His voice is the one stand-alone hook. In almost every song, the lyrics are arranged into extremely catchy rhythms with elaborate rhyme schemes and metric structure. Reznor always delivers with extremely clear, forceful diction. The best example of this is "Sin." The music is fairly forgettable, just a simple house beat, some industrial noises and one keyboard line, but the vocals are striking. When I first heard the album, I couldn't remember any of the music, but the vocal rhythms immediately became ingrained in my memory.
Nine Inch Nails is an industrial band, but this particular album has more in common with new wave than with industrial. It greatly resembles another debut album by an angry young man, Soul Mining by Matt Johnson. Both albums have very similar introspective and emotional subject matter, down to the obsession with god and betrayal, and both are dance-inspired and almost completely electronic. It's no surprise that Reznor is an admirer of Johnson's work, and Johnson's The The was briefly signed to Reznor's Nothing label around 2000.
Reznor's melodramatic grandstanding is on full display here. "Head Like A Hole" describes a conflict with some vague, faceless "god money" who wants to "control" everything. In "Terrible Lie," Reznor states, "I'm on my hands and knees / I want so much to believe," which gets repeated almost verbatim, 18 years later, on Year Zero. Unsurprisingly, these are the most famous songs from the album, and the ones most frequently performed live, because they're the closest in style to Reznor's later work. But his delivery in these songs is perfect, so they still remain his best expressions of this kind of sentiment.
But in the less famous songs on the second side, Reznor shows a different worldview. Here's the first verse of "Ringfinger" in full: "Well, you've got me working so hard lately / Working my hands until they bleed / If I was twice the man I could be / I'd still be half of what you need / Still you lead me and I follow / Anything you ask, you know I'll do / This one act of consecration / Is what I ask of you." This is actually good writing. None of the rhymes are forced and the verse makes perfect sense (unfortunately, the second verse adds a tired Christ metaphor, but whatever). Now, what's Trent talking about? That's right: he's asking the girl he likes to marry him!
You see, he doesn't do this on The Downward Spiral, because on The Downward Spiral he presents himself as a suffering poet and artist, a tormented larger-than-life rock-god. Tormented larger-than-life rock-gods do not make marriage proposals, that can only be the act of an ordinary man, one who has to work hard every day. And that is why Pretty Hate Machine is the better album: because it depicts the same dramatic emotions realistically, from the perspective of an ordinary man who basically just wants to settle down with a nice girl.
"That's What I Get" is written in the same way: "How could you turn me into this / After you just taught me how to kiss you?" It's melodramatic, but it's exactly how a bewildered, sensitive teenage boy would feel upon finding out that the girl he loves has been around. On The Downward Spiral, Trent already knows how to kiss you, in fact he wants to boink you like an animal because it makes him feel closer to god. "Closer" is how teenage boys want to see themselves, and "That's What I Get" is the way they really are.
"The Only Time" has a simplistic screaming chorus, but man, those verses: "I'm drunk and right now I am so in love with you / and I don't want to think too much about what we should or shouldn't do," and then the sensual and perceptive addition, "I swear I've just found everything I need / The sweat in your eyes, the blood in your veins are listening to me." It's such a shame that he doesn't write this way anymore, because there are so few rock lyricists who can (actually Matt Johnson is one). Instead, they over-dramatize themselves, much like Reznor on the later Nine Inch Nails albums.
Perversely, the ballad "Something I Can Never Have," which is much more famous, is actually weaker than these songs, because it's so much more vague. But somehow the "honest" songs make the "vague" songs sound more convincing. So, on the whole, the album sounds sincere and intelligent.
But what about the reissue? Sadly, it's not all that could have been. On the plus side, it sounds great, and it picks up the Queen cover from the "Sin" single. However, these uncertain early years also produced a fair amount of totally original, unreleased material like "Maybe Just Once," "Purest Feeling," and live staple "Now I'm Nothing." People buy reissues partly for this sort of rarity, so I'm surprised that such an opportunity was missed. For that reason, this release will mostly be valuable to new fans who may have overlooked this intense early work.
Description of Pretty Hate Machine: 2010 Remaster
Fans can now revisit the conception of Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor's Null Corporation has teamed with UMe/The Bicycle Music Company to release "Pretty Hate Machine: 2010 Remaster" on November 22, 2010. After completing the score for David Fincher's The Social Network, Reznor oversaw the digital remastering of Pretty Hate Machine from the newly unearthed original tapes with engineer Tom Baker (whose NIN credits include "The Downward Spiral," "Broken," "The Fragile," "With Teeth" and "Ghosts"). This remastered version includes an eleventh track, a cover of Queen's "Get Down Make Love," originally the B-side to the "Sin" single and produced by Al Jourgensen. Rob Sheridan, NIN's longtime art director, has also re-imagined the packaging of "Pretty Hate Machine" under Reznor's supervision. As a young musician in Cleveland, Ohio, Reznor took a job at a local recording studio and employed unused studio time to develop his own material. The nascent album was later recorded with his favorite producers including Flood/Mark Ellis (U2, Depeche Mode, PJ Harvey), John Fryer (Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil), Adrian Sherwood (Ministry, Cabaret Voltaire) and Keith LeBlanc (Tackhead). The result was the first Nine Inch Nails album, 1989's "Pretty Hate Machine." All songs were written, arranged, programmed and performed by Reznor. The album featured the breakthrough singles "Sin," "Down In It" and "Head Like A Hole," and ultimately sold over 3 million copies, reaching Triple Platinum sales status. In the wake of the album's initial underground success, NIN soon developed a reputation as one of the best live acts in rock and joined the inaugural Lollapalooza tour in 1991. NIN have since sold more than 18 million albums, collected Grammy® Awards and headlined arenas, amphitheaters and festivals worldwide. The Bicycle Music Company acquired the rights to "Pretty Hate Machine" from a division of Prudential Securities in the spring of 2010. It was Bicycle's intention from the onset to enable Reznor to regain some control of this lost piece of NIN's legacy, resulting in this artist approved 2010 reissue of one of music's most groundbreaking and influential albums. Note: The previous CD version was reissued in 2005 but was not overseen by Reznor and is now out of print.Alternative Rock CDs
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