NINE INCH NAILS
With Teeth
Nothing
AIMEE MANN
The Forgotten Arm
SuperEgo Records
· Two albums you may already own and not even know it.
On the surface, the melancholy ballads of Aimee Mann and the raging industrial anger of Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails don’t have a lot in common, but the latest releases from these two artists have more similarities than you might think. Both of them write haunting pieces on piano, channel desperate emotion into their material and, in this instance, seem quite content to retread their old material.
Purists will tell you that Reznor peaked with his NIN debut Pretty Hate Machine in 1989, but there are legions of club-goers who got their angry groove on grinding away to "Closer" from 1994s The Downward Spiral. Fusing snarling guitars, raging misanthropy and industrial music has always been his forte and With Teeth is definitely in that vein. So much so that this album often sounds like a retread. Pushing the limits of vocal distortion and haunting vocal and piano work, it’s a solid record ("Getting Smaller" has a viscously catchy homage to "Planet of Sound" by The Pixies), but ultimately the album can’t escape its past.
The same is true of Mann’s latest. Conceived as a concept album that tells the story of a boxer, The Forgotten Arm is full of melancholy, mid-tempo numbers and strong, beautiful vocals. There is a slightly increased sense of urgency here, but her storytelling piano ballads, even when they are fleshed out by her crack backing band, can only go so far. It’s gorgeous, emotional and perfectly produced, but so were all her other albums. Whether she is writing about characters that inspired the film Magnolia or the boxing underworld of The Forgotten Arm, the result is the same – a good record, but one that doesn’t break new ground
NINE INCH NAILS 3/5
AIMEE MANN 3/5
JASON LEWIS
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