Nine Inch Nails - The Slip

And there I was thinking that Ghosts would be the only Nine Inch Nails record of 2008. How wrong am I? And how productive is Trent Reznor these days? Jeez. Anyways, Trent feels that he has hit a songwriting peak, aided by the addition of Robin Finck to their rehearsals of the touring they are about to do in the USA this summer. The result is The Slip - the 8th studio album by the industrial rockers and given out free by Reznor this morning, with artwork included. This was his way of saying thank you to the fans saying 'this one's on us.'

This is also definitely not the next part of Ghosts. What this ends up as is a much more direct album than Ghosts and Year Zero. 1,000,000 (the first proper track after the intro of 999,999) is a clear statement of intent - a song that rocks. Hard. The next song, Letting You, is even more brutal in its drumming and its clear at this point that Trent has found his bite again after the peaceful ambiance on Ghosts.

The two songs released for free by the band in the last couple of weeks follow. Discipline has now fully grown on me after my scathing review of it first time around and I now concur with the notion that this is a groovy song. Bass-driven, heavy, yet as danceable as The Hand That Feeds and Only, this could be a real highlight in the live sets. Echoplex is a pretty chilled out song in comparison but it has a really cool and sleek vibe to it. Heads Down is another typical NIN rocker with a bit of techno freestyling akin to The Great Destroyer from Year Zero added for good measure.

From here in on, the album very bluntly takes on a different tone. Lights In The Sky tries to be an intimate, raw, edgy piano ballad but it ends up being something that NIN have done before in the past a lot better. This leads into seven-minute instrumental Corona Radiata - the track most reminiscent of anything off Ghosts - which, whilst with its moments, is unspectacular. The Four Of Us Are Dying continues the ambient vibe but one with a more industrial sound and considerably louder. Demon Seed finishes off the album, but even that is instantly forgettable.

So, overall, this album definitely has its fair share of good tracks - something of a relief after the experimentations of their instrumental project. There are some stinkers towards the end that let down the album, but what people shouldn't forget is that Nine Inch Nails can still produce heavy, angry, noisy rock songs almost two decades after their debut record.

RATING - 7/10

You can download The Slip for free here.

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