NIN - Album Review
Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks Let me start off by saying that Hesitation Marks is a masterpiece. How others will receive it, or how it’ll be remembered as a consensus is yet to be seen, but I find it to be one of the best albums of the last decade. If you’re looking for the next Head Like a Hole or Wish, you won’t find it here. That may disappoint some or even many. But as Trent Reznor has progressed as a person and a musician, I’ve found myself on a parallel field of growth that the maturity of Hesitation Marks really resonates with. This may come off as a love letter to Nine Inch Nails, but it isn’t. I certainly can’t deny that is it for this album. Is it perfect? Honestly, who am I to say one way or the other, but in my opinion it’s not. There is a track or four that I don’t particularly care for. I have some favorites already—Find My Way, Various Methods of Escape, and Running—but it’s too early to say how they’ll fair in comparison to my preferences on earlier works. Overall, I find the consistency and sensual mood of Hesitation Marks to easily earn it’s place as NIN’s best album. I have to admit, after getting Came Back Haunted early and noticing that it has the repetitive quality that I disliked about a large portion of With Teeth, I was a little worried. Because of that, the way I approached Hesitation Marks was to buy it a track at a time off of iTunes. What happened is that I there were still eight or so songs left that I hadn’t yet paid for, and the purchase amount to pick up the whole album at that point was down to around $1.50, so it was hardly a difficult choice. An additional bonus—available only on the Deluxe Edition—is the podcast-like monologue of Reznor at the tail end of the album, where he plays pre-vocal, instrumental demos of music that didn’t make the final cut, which I found to be more enjoyable than some of the other songs that had. The sound of Hesitation Marks is eerily honest, which is both immensely pleasurable and disconcerting. You know that feeling of being at rock bottom with baggy eyes plump with tears and either a gun or a lethally dosed syringe in your hand? Me neither, but we all have something comparable within us that only needs the right trigger to come splurging out at the moment we’d want it least. Reznor and his main musical mate, Atticus Ross, have cornered and turned that sensation into something beautiful. Inside me, there is a scared little boy that has blackened to rot, which is a very real part of myself that is critical to acknowledge. The insecurity of that darkness only worsens when you refuse to respect that it’s there. And it is, whether it’s physical in nature for some, or rears itself as judgment for others. As corny as it sounds—but I genuinely believe it to be true—there is a sacrificial element to Hesitation Marks. Reznor and crew have personified a raw, primal, tortured soul nerve, allowing the listener to temporarily escape by living and releasing it vicariously through the music. Maybe that’s unhealthy. Not for the reasons that would seem obvious, but I’d argue are incorrect. Where I find it to be risky is if I/you were to get lost in the message, avoiding proper introspection rather than using it as a quick fix. It may seem like I’m grossly over analyzing, but we’ve seen troubled people misuse the absorption of powerful and even not so powerful musical works in the past. Just look at the obsessive misgivings of Nirvana fans, or before that, the same could be seen out of some overzealous ‘satanic’ heavy metal followers, or if you really need further proof, Charles Manson and friends. If you’re not a lowest common denominator retard, who can’t play Call of Duty without developing an urge to shoot up a school, or a bitter douchebag that finds holes to poke in anything that doesn’t meet your impossible expectations because you’re only capable of perceiving art in an unflushed toilet, you need not apply. But if you like Nine Inch Nails and any of Reznor’s recent soundtrack work, you’ll probably be in to Hesitation Marks. I can’t guarantee that it’ll impact you the same as it has me, but it will more than likely make a lasting impression. The unnerving melodic tone of the album is summed up nicely by a simplistic but profound lyric in the chorus of the tenth track, Running, when Reznor soothingly but warningly declares, “I’m running out of places I can hide from this.”
