Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile

Did this really need to be a double album? I mean, seriously, Trent, the fact that you have so much art coming out of you (rather like puss from an open sore…) is great, it really is. But have you ever heard of the philosophy “less is more?” Wouldn’t it have been better to keep it concise, and in the process save your listeners a little money?

Double albums are a little bit tricky, because you need to do several things with them. First off, you need to make sure that you have enough to say to actually fill two album-lengths. Secondly, what you have to say better be pretty freaking important. Thirdly, you have to keep your listener’s attention through the entire 90 to 120 minutes of the proceedings. Bands usually do this by switching it up a lot, like on those two masterpieces, Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness and The White Album. Other times, they do it by having an honest-to-God story, like on Tommy and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile falls just short on the first two things, but remarkably succeeds at the third, but not in either of the previously mentioned ways. No, The Fragile holds your attention by being so gosh-darned interesting that you can’t look away for long. I don’t think, however, that that feature makes it worthy of being a double album. It could have been every ounce as interesting if it had been an ordinary, 55-minute, single-disc album. Not only does The Fragile not have enough to say, it doesn’t even say anything new. Reznor basically covered the area of “my life sucks” ad nauseum with his first three albums. Like I said in my review of With Teeth, the main reason The Fragile was such a disappointment over The Downward Spiral was my age. I was 14 when The Downward Spiral came out, and 18 for The Fragile. That four years made a world of difference. I had grown up in the intervening time, and at a much faster rate, apparently, than Reznor. He was still stuck in the “oh woe is me” stage, though he had gotten a little subtler and smarter about it. The one leap forward he made, however, was that he no longer saw suicide as cool or romantic, as he said in interviews.

When you zoom out and look at The Fragile as a whole, you see that it’s a pretty ambitious effort that really pays off in its own weird way. It’s when you look too closely at individual moments that it starts to break down. But it’s a double album, so it has enough absolutely great moments to balance out the ho-hum and bleh ones. It takes quite a bit of effort (not to mention a sizable time commitment) to get much out of it, though. There’s really no sense in highlighting individual songs, since most of them have the same emotional color. The dirgy crunch and cold industrialism of this type of music is surprisingly aided by this album’s increased use of guitars and other stringed instruments. Trent Reznor has said that stringed instruments are imperfect, unlike computers, which will execute what you tell them to without error. That element fell exactly in line with what he was trying to accomplish with this album, and Reznor really has some intriguing sounds on it. Taken as a whole, The Fragile is a very good addition to NIN’s discography, even if it’s really long-winded and not very lyrically original. But to really enjoy it, you can’t think too hard about it. Trent wins points for expanding the definition of “music” a little, but loses a lot of them for not knowing what to keep and what to discard.

Prime Cuts:
Into the Void
The Wretched
Where is Everybody?
We’re In This Together
Just Like You Imagined

22 Rating: 7

(Incidentally, today is the first birthday of Drop 22!)