Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts

It was always going to be interesting to see what Trent Reznor would do after he broke free from Interscope last year. His last album under Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero, was a departure to a more electronically textured sound and came third in my Albums of 2007 list. I still hold it in high regards as one of the best albums that Nine Inch Nails has released.

Which leads us to Ghosts. It' a 4-volume set (although Trent has promised that more might be coming soon) of ambient, instrumental music and the whole thing is just shy of two hours long. Instrumentals are not a new thing for Nine Inch Nails as there have been several of these on past albums like The Downward Spiral, The Fragile, and Year Zero, and all of those pieces fitted in well within the context of the respective albums.

It's a heavy listen. There are certain instrumentals on Ghosts that work really well and some that don't. You could say hit and miss. There also doesn't seem to be anything that connects them together as such. I was expecting it to be something coherent but instead it feels like a bunch of instrumentals. However, that said, the dynamics of the instrumentals are amazing. The softer, piano led ones are beautiful to listen to and the heavier, almost full-band like sound of the louder ones are fascinating to listen to.

So what is my overall impression? I think it's a brave thing to put out something like Ghosts. It is without doubt Trent's most demanding and challenging piece of work to date but, like Year Zero, the rewards are there to be reaped. However, for me anyway, I'm not sure whether I would feel like listening it as much as past albums. The ideas though are definitely there but, if anything, it works best as background music.

RATING - 6/10

DISCLAIMER: This is just a summary of my thoughts after the first listen. If it changes, I'll post up a second opinion in the future.

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