NINE INCH NAILS
"The Slip"
Released: May 5, 2008
Genre: Rock, Industrial

Official Site, MySpace, Wikipedia, Official Album Site (Free Download)

'The Slip' definitely has its moments. Find some songs you like, and throw the rest away if you feel like it. After all, you can’t beat the price.

THANK YOU, TRENT Reznor. Thanks to your feud with record companies, Nine Inch Nails’s eighth studio album, “The Slip,” is free. Nobody pays a cent.

It isn’t even like Saul Williams’ album “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust,” where only the first 100,000 downloads weren’t charged. “The Slip,” for better or worse, will be free forever.

In a world dominated by extremely expensive CD prices, this is a revelation. While only bands with massive live and Internet followings and previous excesses of wealth could afford to follow suit, I’ll take what I can get. After all, record companies deserve to get cut out of the deal if they continue to charge $20 for a CD that probably cost them about $1 to make.

Unfortunately, “The Slip” isn’t quite as memorable for its music as it is for its marketing scheme.

The years haven’t been entirely kind to Reznor (Nails’ sole songwriter), and alcoholism, depression, and disputes with record companies have left him with enough anger and disillusion to provide him with years worth of music.

As such, it strikes me as odd that he would change directions so suddenly. 2007’s failed experiment “Year Zero” was seething with political anger, all of which is suddenly gone.

Stylistically, “The Slip” is somewhere between 2005’s “With Teeth” and the barebones release from earlier this year, “Ghosts I-IV.”

Tracks like “Corona Radiata” and “Lights in the Sky” are very ambient, with barren synthesizer, piano, and the occasional vocal creating a melancholy, oft uncomfortable, atmosphere, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since “A Warm Place” or “Hurt” from 1994’s magnum opus “The Downward Spiral.”

On the flipside, songs like the freakishly catchy first single “Discipline” present the more alternative side of NIN. Relying on simple beats, fuzzy, distorted guitar and undulating bass lines, “The Slip” sounds more akin to a modern indie rock album than to their previous works.

Whereas 1992’s “Broken” and “Spiral” lacerated the listener with sheer intensity and blistering emotion, “The Slip” seems to have put in a protective layer. Lyrically, declarations that God is dead and similar melodrama have gone the way of the dodo, to be replaced by slightly mellower sentiments.

In a similar vein, “The Slip” almost begins to sound as if the beat is being created by a human, as opposed to an angry, sexually frustrated robot. Oddly, this ends up sounding highly natural. For once in the Reznor’s career, the beats have an easygoing, grooving feel, instead of the pounding, primal sounds of “March of the Pigs,” “Heresy” and “Happiness in Slavery.”

For the life of me, however, I cannot tell if this is a good thing or not. While “Discipline” simply wouldn’t be the same without the singly simple beat, I can’t help shaking the feeling that with a heavy drum section, songs like “Head Down” might actually mean something to me for more than 20 seconds.

However, songs like “Letting You” might have benefited from Reznor’s newfound appreciation for lower-intensity beats. The drums’ electronically distorted bleat is blatantly attempting to recall NIN’s past, but unsuccessfully and indeed quite annoyingly. It will take about 15 seconds of the painfully pernicious pounding before one switches songs or, in the case of those who must listen to an album all the way through for the sake of reviewing, one goes insane.

In all, “The Slip” is a little like a narcoleptic serial killer. It can’t tell if it wants to go on a rampage or fall asleep. While on the whole it drifts slightly more to the latter, I can’t truly decide one way or the other on the piece as a whole. It takes a lot to render me speechless as to my final decision on an album, but “The Slip” did it.

Perhaps the best way to describe it is as follows: “The Slip” definitely has its moments. They may tend to be few and far between, but they are there. Just when you think that it’s time to find better music, you find yourself tapping your foot or nodding or whatever it is people do when they hear something they are enjoying.

This may not be Reznor’s best work (scratch that; it definitely isn’t) but it certainly is far from terrible. Take a couple listens, find some songs you like, and throw the rest away if you feel like it. After all, you can’t beat the price.