Album of the week -- Nine Inch Nails -- Pretty Hate Machine (1989)

Some albums reflect exactly where you were in a place in your life and "Pretty Hate Machine" is definitely one of them.

Although the album came out in 1989, I didn't hear it until the fall of my first semester at the University of Montevallo in 1990. I was in the drawing studio at the end of the semester and another art major had this tape blasting in the crusty little toaster of a boom box that looked like it had lived in the that drawing studio since the early '80s. Regardless, it still sounded great and unlike anything I had ever heard before. That still being the era of tapes, I took it back to my dorm and copied it. Although I have always been partial to a guitar-centered sound, I was really loving Depeche Mode's "Violator" at the time and "Pretty Hate Machine" was uncharted listening for everyone at the time. Seems like so many people came in and out of that studio during finals and wanted to know who it was. It had an immediate response.

That fall I had slacked off on reading Rolling Stone since my subscription was being sent to Auburn and had no idea who was behind Nine Inch Nails. It amazed me to learn that this entire album was recorded by Trent Reznor. His use of keyboards, vocal effects, computer percussion and heavily distorted guitar all worked in this amazing symphony. Like so many other great albums, track one melts into track two into three and so on. Like Peter Gabriel's "Passion" you have to listen from start to finish. In the drawing studio over finals that December, I recall listening to this over and over. No one ever got tired of it and wanted to change out tapes.

Although not my favorite genre, I think a lot of the angry rap metal acts that dominated "alternative" radio in the late '90s like Linkin Park, LImp Bizkit, Papa Roach and Korn cut their teeth on this album. For an album of 1989, it really stands by itself.
(Editor's note: Friend and fellow music nerd J. Timothy Georges II points out that Rage Against the Machine was getting their start at the same time NIN was so I removed their name from the original post and replaced it with another, more appropriate band).

Listening back over "Pretty Hate Machine" today, I could see the bitter scorned former band nerd Trent Reznor in the studio by himself without a record contract. He saved money and bought all this studio time on his own and then shopped it to labels. There is no getting around how damn sad most of it. Lyrics like "Gray would be the color if I had a heart" from "Something I Can Never Have" definitely reeks of 'poor pitiful me', but not in the way Morrissey does where you don't really give a damn because he seems like such an elitist prick. Reznor sings and plays with such passion in this album that you know that this is his pain -- not something abstract. By the time we are done with our twenties it's a place that most of us have been at least a once -- in a bad relationship, betrayed and broken-hearted. As sad and melodramatic as most of the album is, there is something universal about it. Painful breakups are something most people drink and/or drug themselves through. The more rational get might get counseling. Reznor put it out there in an album for all to hear and used no flowery metaphors that could be open to interpretation. In "Pretty Hate Machine" Trent is pissed and by God everyone is going to know about it.

Hard core industrial fans called NIN "soft" after this album came out. I never knew and still don't know much about industrial and whether NIN ever fit whatever criteria they were talking about. I have "The Downward Spiral" and it's good, but not as unified a piece of work as the debut. For me it this is album that perfectly punctuated the end of 1990 and will always make me remember my first semester of college, a time not as nearly sad as this album chronicles, but like "Pretty Hate Machine", something completely different from everything I had previously known.