Disc 1: 1) Somewhat Damaged; 2) The Day the World Went Away; 3) The Frail; 4) The Wretched; 5) We're in This Together; 6) The Fragile; 7) Just Like You Imagined; 8) Even Deeper; 9) Pilgrimage; 10) No, You Don't; 11) La Mer; 12) The Great Below
Disc 2: 1) The Way Out Is Through; 2) Into the Void; 3) Where Is Everybody?; 4) The Mark Has Been Made; 5) Please; 6) Starfuckers, Inc.; 7) Complication; 8) I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally; 9) The Big Come Down; 10) Underneath It All; 11) Ripe (With Decay)
Two hours of angst and intensity, and none of it's reaching me. It's a blog about everything I own, but not everything gets a fair cop...
Key tracks: "La Mer", "Starfuckers Inc"
I have a great deal of respect for Trent Reznor for always going his own way and making a remarkable music career out of it, but that respect hasn't really translated to a deeper appreciation for Nine Inch Nails. I like it when Reznor moves a little closer towards his own understanding of what makes a catchy hit; I got close with "The Hand That Feeds" when it was an airplay hit during my first summer job, "Hurt" was good even before Johnny Cash made it his own, "Discipline" is unironically my favourite NIN track, etc. There is absolutely none of that on The Fragile. What it is instead is an ambitious double album ode to depression, paranoia and turmoil, stretched over segueing soundscapes, harsh interludes and headphone-savouring production moments; woven together into a sonical experience intended to be immersed into as a whole. Based on my experience it's the furthest Reznor has sunk into his own production, the ambient albums perhaps excluded, and has the kind of a neon-lettered sign saying "magnum opus" hanging over it that you'd expect from a hefty double album. It's a daunting record both in its mood and its sound design.
It's obvious that The Fragile is nowhere close to where Nine Inch Nails blip on my radar, call me basic if you will. I don't want to call it dull or even uninteresting - there's a lot going on and you can really feel the intent coming through the album. Reznor's on a mission and on a personally important journey, and you can hear that for someone out there, The Fragile will mean absolutely everything. I can easily draw parallels between it and double albums of similar ambition and ilk that do work for me, not in sound but in the ambition and fearless artistic endeavour of it all. The difference is that none of it sticks to me. Sometimes Trent murmurs, sometimes he screams, sometimes he says nothing at all, but very few of them register beyond that. The instrumentals are actually some of the better parts of the album, "La Mer" above all, as they go all-in on the heftiness of the album's atmosphere and turn it into a score of sorts. The noisier parts mostly just repeat one another, though "Starfuckers Inc" sticks mainly because it's a well-needed jolt of something raw and concrete among the extended soundscapes, even if it's title-repeating chorus flirts with being overwhelmingly corny no matter how enraged Trent sounds. For most parts though, even in its more distinguishable parts, The Fragile comes and goes without a reaction and certainly two discs of this is way too much of it.
I try to have it so that every album I own has something to it that makes it an established entity in my collection and which gives me a spark to talk about it - some have developed personal stories behind them, others have a contextual place by being part of a wider discography picture, some are just too good to not own. The Fragile is there by happenstance. Some time back one of my great friends and a fellow music geek donated me a huge box of an incredibly varied selection CDs following a spring cleaning sweep he had done through his shelves. After going through everything in that big cardboard box some CDs were donated forward to other friends of mine who might enjoy them more, some of them were traded for others, and a good number found a new home in my own collection. The Fragile is one of the ones that I kept, but mainly because the digipak packaging was showing rather heavy signs of wear and as a frequent connoisseur of used music myself, I didn't feel like I could sell that forward with any integrity. As a result I've been coming back to it occasionally but no matter how many times I hear it, despite its purposed intensity, it mostly just gets lost in the background with zero reaction.
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