revisiting The Slip today. love how succinct yet all-encompassing of the band's other sounds it is. wish that vinyl reissue would see the light of day!
All the Ghosts releases are suddenly really doing it for me at that particular time of the year. V might be my favorite one.
my partner’s dad gifted me quite the xmas present this year! for context, he used to work for Warner Bros. around this time, and has stuff like this stored away in his mother’s basement and has been slowly going through it all the last few months and I guess he found these while doing that. all sealed and absolutely mint.
doing a discography run-through this week, and giving Deviations 1 my second ever listen. really appreciate how much these instrumentals illuminate all those layers of The Fragile (my favorite NIN album), combined with a ton of different ideas that never saw the light of day. i have the vinyl, but never have the patience to spin it all the way through, so i'm currently listening to my digital copy i uploaded to my Apple Music library. one day i'll sit down and actually play the full 4xLP set front to back.
This is awesome, I've done this many times. When the Deviations LP came out it was just as enthralling as it was shocking. They're one of my favorite bands in the world, and sometimes I think the actual best. I mean, The Slip is insane and led to the incredible Lights In The Sky tour, the two songs on the NINJA tour sampler are incredible, the band is beyond insane live, and each record is markedly different yet totallly nine inch nails. I have my poster from the 2009 Wave Goodbye shows and I'm so glad that wasn't final. Think i'll throw on With Teeth for my drive today, thats kind of a hidden gem to me, most of my friends who like NIN aren't very into it but I certainly am. Could talk about NIN all day. I mean, we finally got the Quake soundtrack LP. Amazing.
have only listened to Deviations once but it was an awesome time. I got the vinyl for like $30 a couple years ago and spun that shit immediately. wish we could get something akin to that for TDS.
Finally have come around on TDS. Will argue everything The Becoming onward (outside of Reptile) is just really not for me
Ruiner onward is my absolute favorite chunk of the album and Reptile is one of my least favorite songs on it haha. still love it and it’s great live but yeah. Eraser is the GOAT tho. drums make me feel like I am being chased by a big scary SOMETHING, but obviously it is representative of the album’s subject’s demons fully coming out and where the explicit intent for suicide is established. I Do Not Want This has always been one of my faves too and I think it’s underrated, the fucking guitars in that bridge sound like the gates of hell opening up and you’re being sucked into them, particularly in the 5.1 mix (the best way to hear the album imo!)
Very excited to take my best friend to his second NIN show ever (his first was the Cleveland HOF show)…he has no idea about the Boys Noize collab for this tour, can’t wait for it to blow his mind.
So agree with so much of this - Ruiner is something punk, The Becoming is the most perfect combined of music and lyric - the whole half is brilliant but every time I've gotten to send them play Reptile it's like transformative. You're somewhere else, some plane you didn't know existed. It's insane
one of my favorite little details: The Becoming fading out to the left while I Do Not Want This fades in on the right.
A Warm Place is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking things I've ever heard. 'The best thing about life is knowing you put it together.'
The Becoming has been (and probably will forever) my favorite NIN song. I've seen them 9 times or so in the last 2 decades, not once gotten to witness it live. Hope this changes next month in NJ.
The Becoming and Big Man With a Gun are probably the two songs on TDS that really solidified the creepiness of that record for me (which continued even more with other cuts on the back half)
the creepiness is one of the biggest draws to it for me. it is one of the few records I have ever heard that uses its sonic palette to paint intense mental health struggles as being as terrifying as they can be to live through, rather than being just explicitly SAD, depressing songs. it’s horrifying and it is befitting of the topics on display.
apologies in advance for this being so long. finished my discography runthrough. had heard everything before, but some albums i hadn't returned to in a few years (despite them being my favorite band). some thoughts i gathered along the way: i love a good handful of songs from PHM – both in terms of the nostalgia and execution – but the sonic gap between this album and the rest of NIN's discography really does feel like a night and day difference. guess there's a reason it ranks pretty lowly for me. no major notes for Broken or TDS. Broken is a great bridge between their PHM sound and what would inspire their other records (and i want to live long enough to experience Gave Up live). TDS is a perfect album. the Quake score is fine but way too ambient for casual listening. you can tell it was Trent's first time scoring anything, and while i love how haunting some of the soundscapes are, i'm not sure i like listening to them as 5-6 minute songs. The Fragile is also a perfect album (and my favorite of theirs). i'd be curious to see what some of the new instrumentals from Deviations would sound like with vocals. Still is underrated, and i wish we got more electric piano on NIN songs (i think there's an alt version of Right Where It Belongs that has it, but it'd be cool to hear some other stripped back versions). With Teeth was one that took me some time to get used to, but has quickly shot up to be one i enjoy a lot more – even if i don't think every song is great. Right Where It Belongs might be my favorite closer of theirs next to Hurt. while i really appreciate what they were trying to do with Year Zero – and i think there's some fantastic percussion work and programming here – i'm not really as high on it as others might be. some songs just don't grab me, and a handful feel a bit derivative of other NIN songs that came before and after this album (i.e. their sound improved upon). i'm not sure how many folks would rank Ghosts I-IV that highly. i rarely revisit it, but when it works, it fires on all cylinders. i appreciate how it allowed Trent and Atticus to experiment with different ambient sounds that informed their future score work (especially considering that two songs on here made it onto The Social network score). The Slip is an album of theirs i just keep coming back to, even if relatively shorter than some other albums. i think side A might be one of their most consistent runs of tracks, with Letting You being in my top 5 favorite NIN songs. i think the back to back instrumentals on side B (Corona Radiata and The Four of Us Are Dying) take me out of it a bit (especially since they take up almost 1/3 of the album's runtime), but it's a solid and underappreciated record in their discography. i'll also say the same for Hesitation Marks – the first NIN album i heard back in 2013. i know lots of people don't like this album, and i'll give them a little bit of that re: some of the album's lyricism/vocal cadences, but man, what Trent was doing with production on this album just scratches a major itch for me. i've been slowly getting back into writing music again, and in my head, the ideal soundscape pulls from this album and The Slip quite a bit. the EP trilogy (NTAE/Add Violence/Bad Witch) might be my favorite work of theirs since The Fragile. it brought back a lot of the edge i think they'd been missing for a few albums, while also toying with some unique experimentation. She's Gone Away always blows me away every time i hear it(and i nearly screamed when i watched Twin Peaks Part 8 when it aired and heard them playing it), and it's kind of insane that a band like them can have the longevity they do and then drop something like God Break Down the Door. i hope with their next album they dip their toes back into these waters a tiny bit, because nearly a decade later, it all still feels so fresh. the consensus around Ghosts V and VI is obviously that they were most likely repurposed versions of their scrapped score for The Woman in the Window. i'm not sure how the full score would've flown together during the initial cut of the movie (which i haven't seen), but i think it was right to separate them into the two releases they are. Ghosts V: Together is probably my favorite out of the whole Ghosts series. i know it got a lot of play from me during the early days of the pandemic, and just feels so cohesive and well-executed of a record. Ghosts VI: Locusts, meanwhile, is one i rarely revisit. there are some great songs there, but i don't think it has the emotional pull that V has. it's pretty sinister sounding in places, which is both a strength and a weakness because it's obviously something i enjoy in NIN releases or TR/AR scores, but it makes for a harder listen. and compared to Ghosts I-IV, despite how scattershot it can be, i think the highs on that collection exceed the highs of Locusts, even if Locusts is better-sequenced. i know others in this thread didn't much care for the band's score for TRON: Ares (which i also haven't seen), but i think it might be one of my favorite scores from them (behind Dragon Tattoo, TSN, and Challengers, maybe tied with Watchmen). and despite being a score first and foremost, i think its near exclusive use of electronics makes it feel more in line with NIN's work than TR/AR. while i wish there were more songs with vocals, the four we got on the soundtrack have me incredibly excited for their next album, and i think it's sequenced in a way that works well for casual listening outside of a film (although bonus points for the obvious homages to the sounds of Wendy Carlos's score throughout, and maybe a nod or two to Daft Punk's as well). the only thing i'm not huge on is the number of reprises. i'm sure they make sense in the film, but some of them just feel way too similar to their initial appearances on the score and take me out of it. updated discography ranking: The Fragile The Downward Spiral Trilogy (Not the Actual Events/Add Violence/Bad Witch) Broken The Slip Hesitation Marks TRON: Ares With Teeth Ghosts V: Together Year Zero Still Pretty Hate Machine Ghosts I-IV Ghosts VI: Locusts Quake
Ive been a fan since the nineties, and my favorite era is Year Zero/The Slip. The ARG around Year Zero was amazing and then being able to experience the Lights In the Sky tour, which is still the best show I've ever been to, probably solidified my opinion on it.