Breakneck Beats

Last week, Trent Reznor took us 20 minutes into the future with his latest set of post-apocalyptic ditties, Nine Inch Nails' Broken. Like his industrial brethren Ministry and Skinny Puppy, Reznor revels in echo beats and electronic tom-toms in overdrive. His voice careens between a whisper and a roar, then lurches full throttle into screams that make Kurt Cobain look like Billie Holiday.

Of course, any sort of beautiful/ugly dichotomy is obscured, in large part by lyrics twisted enough to induce mental rubbernecking. And the music's origin an the product of one man's technological tinkering only enhances the alienated tone of the songs themselves.

The first track on the EP starts with a minute of static morse-code dashes which flicker in like a weak TV signal, then coagulate into a discrete pulse of white noise. An electronic church bell chimes in the distances. Then the whole soundscape explodes into a furious riot of 130-plus beat per-minute drums, thrash-synth and Trent Reznor's ragged vocals. The song zaps into silence four and a half minutes later.

Reznor's self-flagellating rampage continues unabated through scenes of "Human junk just words and so much skin/Stick my hands through the cage of this endless routine/Just some flesh caught in this big broken machine."

Alienating stuff. According to Reznor, the making of the album was no less hellish. It was "a hard recording to make. Broken is an ugly record made during an ugly time in my life," he writes. "Broken was secretly of locations without the permission of The Record Label to ensure it could fester without Divine Intervention."

He adds that "Nine Inch Nails is still not a real band with real people playing real instruments."

Actually, it's an interesting semantic problem, naming the sounds on Broken, like "guitar" or "drums," for instance, since most or all of this music comes out of a computer. In fact, there are definitely no acoustic drums. So we're left with a question of definition. Should a computer-generated sound that resembles a guitar be called "guitar?" If a tree falls in the forest...

Musical epistemology. You gotta love it.

Like all good industrial music, Nine Inch Nails' sound is so overwhelmingly technical that it becomes primal. Speed ("Wish" clocks in at 180 beats per minute) and volume give the EP a sense of manic urgency. Broken also celebrates destructive impulse in all its magnetic horror and beauty. It is violence you can dance to. "1000 lips/ 1000 tongues/ 1000 throats/ 1000 lungs/ 1000 ways to make it true/ I want to do terrible things to you."

It's a good listen, in a twisted way, like a recorded suicide note or a videotaped last will and testament. You'll find yourself rewinding it a lot. It has that kind of Macabre charm--just in time for those first paper deadlines.