Nine Inch Nails

Tried to save myself

But my self keeps slipping away

If you can't beat them, join them. Who knows whether Trent Reznor ever gave a thought to Julius Caesar's famous maxim during those tormented, glorious Nineties. Certainly, without realizing it, he took it to heart. Had he not grabbed his demons by the collar and turned self-destruction into a downright thrilling artistic process, chances are we wouldn't even remember Nine Inch Nails today. As we know, things went differently: Mr. Self-Destruct, as he liked to call himself, managed to show his own fragility, face it head-on and turn it into a strength, indeed into something extraordinarily compelling, building a gleaming edifice out of what might otherwise have looked like nothing but rubble. In the ten years spanning the three undisputed masterpieces of the NIN saga, "Pretty Hate Machine" (1989), "The Downward Spiral" (1994) and "The Fragile" (1999), lies - for better or worse - all the Trent Reznor we could ever need.

At the time, of course, he needed all of it himself, first and foremost. Alcohol and cocaine abuse, attempts at detox, looming depression, escapades in and out of recording studios often in the company of Marilyn Manson, the conflicted relationship between inner turmoil and the urgency to express it through music, between isolation and the need to reveal himself out there, in a drive for catharsis that somehow becomes genuine personal redemption: perhaps there's nothing new in any of this, except - precisely - in the musical outcome it produced.

"The Downward Spiral" landed like a bomb inside an American rock scene that had just found itself orphaned of its most beloved and tormented protagonist: Kurt Cobain. In its undeniable greatness, that album still remains somewhat anchored to the industrial lineage it draws from (Ministry first and foremost), while at the same time seeking out an entirely new style. A work that draws on tradition, reshapes it in Reznor's modern and recognizable fashion, and spits it back out with unprecedented violence: the greatness of the songs, their implicit (self-)violence and, ultimately, their epochal significance are beyond dispute.

With "The Fragile" the picture becomes broader and more complex. Once again, Reznor decides to do almost everything himself: he isolates himself completely during the writing phase, comfortable in his dual role as jack-of-all-trades musician and producer - though the latter task would later be entrusted, during recording and post-production at Nothing Studios in New Orleans (alongside fellow travelers such as Adrian Belew, Dave Ogilvie, Charlie Clouser and Jerome Dillon), to the skilled hands of the formidable duo Bob Ezrin and Alan Moulder. It would fall to the latter to untangle the intricate web spawned by Reznor: the result was twenty-three tracks, eventually split across a double album, divided into left and right.

Compared to "The Downward Spiral", the new material stands out not only for its even more meticulous, "precise" attention to sound, but also for a greater alternation between explosive songs and more subdued passages, distributed in an almost even split that makes the record even more dissonant and disorienting - proof that the artist about to leap into the new millennium had changed, had he evolved? - compared to the visceral, almost out-of-control figure who had made a name for himself everywhere, to the point of being named by Time one of the most influential personalities of his era, just five years earlier.

It's likely, moreover, that Trent Reznor had grasped the potential of the kind of songwriting that gave rise to "Hurt": paradoxically, on a record that made sonic assault and muscle-flexing its stylistic trademark, the most resounding success - at least with the general public - went to the most "fragile" and heartfelt song of the bunch, to the point of becoming a cross-generational anthem (famously covered by Johnny Cash) that remains hard to dent to this day. In this sense, "The Fragile" is a constant up-and-down at the mercy of Reznor's shifting moods: rage, hallucinations, moments of calm, sudden and fleeting redemptions populate a record in which listeners find it remarkably easy to see themselves, since the protagonist's feelings belong to everyone - they're universal.

There is, in short, a sense of empathy - toward himself and toward others too - running through a substantial part of this material, which not by chance keeps shifting continuously from I to we. The point is no longer to control the madness, but to channel it into different forms. One of the tricks is a return to the piano, the first instrument young Trent had ever gotten to grips with, discovering even then that he had considerable talent.

Sure, "The Fragile" is also largely an electric, electronic record, lashed by rough, jagged instrumental waves, impulsive and excessive, hyper-modern in both language and sound. But that, as we said, is just one of many sides of the same coin. Another one springs from the keys. These are sporadic yet emblematic chapters, largely instrumental, sometimes mistaken for mere interludes in the narrative, in which one seems to reconnect with the very soul of the Nine Inch Nails project: "The Frail" moves from apparent calm to a crescendo of suspense that sets up the menacing "The Wretched".

A pairing that shows how "The Fragile" is something akin to a concept album about inner turmoil — in any case, one of those works where there's no such thing as the skip button, unless you're willing to distort the intimate architecture of the piece and break the pact struck with the artist. Piano is also the backbone of "La Mer", perhaps the track that best conveys just how far Reznor's sonic exploration had pushed, morphing into something halfway between modern classical (cello and double bass make an appearance), pop and avant-garde.

Another novelty that captures the stylistic complexity of "The Fragile" comes with the movements closing out the left and right sides, "The Great Below" and "Ripe (With Decay)". These are rarefied, essentially ambient pieces, in which Reznor's poetics rest on sparse guitar figures — the monochord loops of the closing track echo Alice In Chains — mirroring themselves once again in the calmer waters of the unconscious, clutching at faint stirrings of hope ("I can still feel you/ even so far away").

As for the more impetuous side, the more recognizable one and perhaps still the majority in purely quantitative terms, what we mostly witness is a taming of the bestial violence that defined "The Downward Spiral". Some episodes still "hold out" where the fury turns blind again: the chorus of "No, You Don't" and the whole of "Starfuckers, Inc." — the latter dedicated to the controversial relationship with Manson and a worthy heir to "March Of The Pigs" — remind us what this steamrolling machine is capable of when it decides to cut the brakes.

It's clear, though, that this isn't the stylistic hallmark everything should revolve around. "The Fragile" operates on subtler mechanisms, on structures that are — fittingly — more fragile, and all the more precious for it. It ranges from industrial flare-ups, immediately evident in "Somewhat Damaged" with its mechanized gait, to losing itself in the electric swells of a extraordinary "The Day The World Went Away". It can reach great peaks of lyricism ("We're In This Together", devoted to the theme of addiction "to everything, addiction to things and people") and stage small-yet-grand noise-rock orchestrations (the extraordinary "Just Like You Imagined", accompanied by Adrian Belew's guitar virtuosity, a kind of industrial-pop for new lost generations), before dissolving into the spectral atmospheres of "Even Deeper" and finally into the dystopian nightmares of "Pilgrimage".

On this journey to the center of his own darkness, Reznor searches in the album's second half for, if not a way out, then at least a hypothetical redemption. The title of the opening "The Way Out Is Through" is emblematic of this quest, one programmatically destined to remain unfinished. The use of near-funk rhythms in "Into The Void", "Where Is Everybody?" and "The Mark Has Been Made", though half-hidden beneath the usual industrial armor, introduces a theme barely explored until now, that of the midtempo (already put to good use earlier on "Closer"), destined nonetheless to shatter against new, growing fractures: "Please", "Starfuckers, Inc.".

The kaleidoscopic, synthetic visions of "Complication" and the postmodern noise of "Underneath It All" are followed by the bare yet dramatic finale of "Ripe (With Decay)", which closes this new descent into hell on the threshold of a hypothetical purgatory. Where everything has come undone, all that's left is to rebuild, once again, from scratch: every ending is a new beginning, and vice versa.

And for once in my life I feel complete

And I still want to ruin it

Do you know how far this has gone?

Just how damaged have I become?