Nine Inch Nails, Add Violence, A Review (2017)

Nine Inch Nails, Add Violence, A Review (2017)

By: Ghost Writer

Rock N Roll Animal

Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and company (including the always interesting Alessandro Cortini)  keep on walking an interesting path between Throbbing Gristle, synth pop and ambient music all spiked with heavy metal guitars, although I wasn't completely satisfied with 2013´s Hesitation Marks, the next record, last year´s Not the Actual Events (an Ep) was a well-received departure, and the fact that Add Violence is another Ep definitely helps avoiding filler, delivering a lean collection of tightly focused music, right from the start with Less Than where synth pop keyboards play a big role upbeat synthetic percussion and razor sharp guitars, Reznor studio magic adds a multi-dimensional depth to the piece making enough alterations to keep one's attention at each second, on The Lovers things get even weirder, as Reznor gets into Lynchian territory, playing with atmosphere quirky electronica and ambient sounds, production wise, Reznor is capable of reaching pop, minimalism and small doses of dubstep, going even more into ambient stuff on the eerie This Isn't the Place, a piece resulting of recent Reznor experiments with Erick Satie and Brian Eno musical innovations, transforming sounds, letting notes vibrate and mutate by giving them space.

The way Not Anymore reminds me at first of Kraftwerk, but invisibly shifts into a semi industrial piece with churning guitars and Sonic Youth like dynamics, but Reznor is the master of quick tempo shifts, creating interesting and disorienting soundscapes thanks to about cut and paste techniques, filling his songs with as much musical ambition as he is capable of, sometimes even returning to his previous works like the now classic The Downward Spiral, whose spirit is omnipresent throughout the next song, an experimental piece named The Background World, which also lifts influence from Hesitation in order to build a big piece of detailed ambient like sound, Reznor and company are redefining their sound here, getting back to their roots and embracing more and more what made them really good in the begging, Add Violence is a beautiful piece of music, both accessible and chaotic, to me is a definitely step forward from previous recording and a surely welcomed piece on the Nine Inch Nails catalog with a defying ending just for true fans.