The Slip + DVD [CD+DVD, Limited Edition]

For a person who only released three full length albums from 1989 to 2005, Trent Reznor must be making up for lost time as The Slip is album number four since 2005s With Teeth and second in the space of a couple of months following March's 2008 release of instrumental classic Ghosts i-iv. That's not including a remix album and a live dvd/blu ray.

This album got its physical release in July 2008 after its free download release in may 2008, and its classic nin, where as ghosts was all instrumental The Slip has complete vocal tracks and they are brilliant. 1,000,000 and Letting You are two of the best songs to start any nin album. They hit you like a freight train and would become a staple of that summers brilliant Lights in the Sky tour, starting the show every night. Your then hit by Discipline which has a real disco dance feel to it, Echoplex and Head Down are real growers that will have you coming back for repeated listens. They are followed by the instrumental part of the album, Lights in the Sky which has a very quietly sung lyrics, Corona Radiata continues the Ghosts theme. The Four of us are Dying wouldn't have been out of place on 1999s album The Fragile. The album finishes with the brilliant Demon Seed which started life as Ghost 38 on the deluxe edition of Ghosts i-1v.

The cd also comes with a bonus dvd that has the band playing five songs (1,000,000, letting you, discipline, echoplex and head down) from rehearsals and is a nice bonus. all the cds are numbered from 1 to 250,000 and is a limited release, so get your copy before it gets rare and expensive.

I picked this up when it was released as a free download, so I can't speak for the DVD.

I will also say that my allegiance to NIN is less a matter of fandom and more a "passing interest". I saw the free download and, like any good Scot, took merciless advantage of it. However, on the basis of The Slip, I've picked up a bit more of Reznor's work, so it has at least that to recommend it.

One reviewer has likened The Slip to a jamming session, which I think is unfair. These are, as far as I can tell, fully formed musical tracks and by no means throwaway freebies to keep the fans busy between proper album releases.

In style, this is rough, hard electronica-metal, supporting Trent's very easily recognisable vocal style (like Michael Stipe, I don't believe there's any way you could mistake Reznor's voice for someone else's). 1,000,000 is an excellent example of the harsh, uncompromising and highly distinctive sound that he achieves. It's quite hard to describe in a meaningful manner, but I guess if it was played with real instruments (rather than synths) you could call it good, old fashioned thrash metal. Not particularly tuneful, but persistent, thumping and abrasive. If I was to criticise (and far be it from me!) I would possibly accuse the first half of the album of being a bit "samey" but, hey, you could probably have said the same about Dark Side of the Moon, so it's not much of a complaint, I suppose.

The hardness does calm down a little in the second half of the set when we hit what are probably my favourite two tracks, Lights in the Sky and Corona Radiata. These are much more in the way of ambient music; Lights is a peaceful, whispered melody accompanied by piano (a real one, if I don't mistake) which blends seamlessly into the instrumental Corona Radiata. This track returns to the synths and builds from a slow, quiet, almost monotonous start (which, for some reason always puts me in mind of the Mercury Transit scene from the film Sunshine ) into a menacing, marching rhythm which seems to include the wailing of tortured cats (no-one could describe Reznor's work as being unoriginal!). The Four of Us Are Dying continues the ambient (well, sort of) theme and segues nicely into Demon Seed. This seems to be many peoples' favourite and I have to agree that it is pretty darned good. It's more in the line of "typical" NIN - hard industrial metal with a ragged edge - and I guess it'd make a pretty decent crowd pleaser at NIN concerts. I can certainly imagine myself moshing to it and it makes a pretty good "workout" track on my MP3 player for my cycle ride to work in the morning.

All in all, being free (unless you want the video), this is a bit of a bonus for NIN fans and for anyone who enjoys experimental industrial metal and, that it can be downloaded free, should not be taken as a sign that it's the sweepings from the cutting room floor.

Watching you drown,
I'll follow you down,
And I am here right beside you.
The lights in the sky are waving goodbye,
And I am staying right beside you

Having finally kicked the drugs, Trent Reznor is clearly making up for lost time. "The Slip", his second album in as many months (and his eighth full length recording in the past three years - four albums, a remix set, a concert set, and two album length recordings for other artists), is clearly the work of a man driven.

Perhaps it's the fact that he's finally seen the end of a carefully managed, famine-like major label contract that rewarded mass exploitation and touring instead of creativity, and managed to recast himself as a modern-day Prince : wresting control of his destiny as a self-sufficient entity.

Last month, he released "Ghosts" - a 36 track, two hour instrumental epic experiment : this month he's followed it with "The Slip", a succinct 44 minute album fired by the kind of creativity and prolificitivty that recalls the glory days of the Sixties, where a new record by either The Who or The Stones or The Beatles would come out every few weeks. Bluntly put, it's not too much from a man who used to release a record every five years if we were lucky.

And so, "The Slip" is the seventh Nine Inch Nails album (or the fourteenth, including reissues, remix, and concert sets). And what you want to know is... is it any good?

In a word - yes. It's perhaps not quite as good as previous Nine Inch Nails records, but with a bar set so high previously, few, if any could match it. What "The Slip" is the sound of a man reborn, shaming lesser artists with his work-rate and creativity.

Firstly, lets highlight a few key points. Unlike previous Nine Inch Nails albums, which saw Reznor as a one man dictator of the group and performing every instrument with a paranoid despotism, "The Slip" is the first work of a band lineup of Nine Inch Nails : albeit, one where every song is written by Reznor, but one where other musicians are credited as performers, not mere contributors. It's shorter in length than any Nine Inch Nails album previous, and in many ways scanter. Thematically, the record eschews the usual Nine Inch Nails concept to collect nothing less - and nothing more - than ten new songs. If anything, "The Slip" is reminiscent of Bowies classic Berlin trilogy ; six vocal songs book ended by four instrumentals that all evoke an emotional resonance., aided and abetted by a perfectly chosen selection of musicians, including the unrecognised genius that is Guns'N'Roses guitarist Robin Finck.

It's not just the release schedule that is evocative of a lost age : "The Slip" is constructed to easily remind the owner of a vinyl LP : there's a distinct break between track 5 and 6 stylistically that reminds me of getting up, flipping the disc over, and dropping the needle onto side two. And, as the record drifts to the traditional low point of the last quarter, the album evolves slowly to a series of barely whispered vocals in "Lights In The Sky", before unfolding with "Corona Radiata" to evaporate to the ether with a strong set of instrumental passages that fiercely rebuke the old-standing `side two' lag of a vinyl Lp where you could hear a hardworking but creatively constipated band squeezing out songs with an eye for a fast-approaching release date. This is not contractual obligation but the work of someone who wants to, not someone who has to.

The songs here are subtle evolutions from the longstanding Nine Inch Nails template : songs aren't thought-out to the gazillionth permutation but products of an organic spring of inspiration. There are drawbacks - notably, single "Discipline" features a vocal mistakenly introduced (and hastily silenced) a bar too early due to a rushed mix, and the tracks fade-out is spliced too early : an inevitable result of a quick workrate. Lyrically, the album is a sparser, less complex affair than any previous Nine Inch Nails record, relying on a lyrical repetition that reveals multiple interpretations, on short and relatively straightforward imagery, on vocal melodies that are tonally short and instantly memorable at the same time : in many ways, "The Slip" is the nearest Nine Inch Nails have yet come to evoking the spirit of The Ramones with a guerilla record-and-release ethic and songs that seem to have been born fully formed.

There are certainly some classic NIN moments here : the dense production and organic sounds match the maelstrom of anything in their previous body of work, most notably in instant classics "Discipline" and "Echoplex", and many high points. "The Slip" sounds like the work of a profilic man mining a deep seam of rich creativity and still coming up with the goods.