It jars you, immediately setting you ill at ease. There is a crackle of soundtrack - you realize that you're listening to silence in another room, from another day. There are tiny clicks as the album revolves in your stereo - tiny barbs blooming soft in the mix, drawing your attention in. Another bludgeon - this time, generating a human groan. You hear background noises, out of focus. What sounds like chatter...you realize is a plea for help. A guttural, wordless appeal to mercy is cut short by yet another hit
- and another -
and another. The punches land mechanically, plodding a sort of rhythm that accelerates into a steady pulse. Those guttural moans are now shouts of pain - any words drowned out by those deafening hits. The tempo of this visceral display of audio violence nears breakneck speed. It all feels as if the whole sample could careen into oblivion at any second...and then it does, hurdling you into a nightmarish soundscape of white noise.
This is how The Downward Spiral begins.
Every second of music on this album retains the tension established within those first few moments. This is one of those rare kinds of records that stands out as truly artistic, authentic and original - one that directly references its creator's influences (Ministry, David Bowie) yet stands out as decidedly unique. Although Spiral produced a single highly popular in the Pop music scene - one that endures constant radio rotation even to this day - this album is decidedly anti-pop. The Downward Spiral is as conceptually diverse as it is aesthetically textured; while every one of these fourteen songs develop Reznor's lyrical vision of a man driven to madness, they all also reflect the artist's incredible attention to sonic detail and nuance. It is, by my estimation and for all intents and purposes, a perfect album.
The speeding locomotive of the album opener (Mr. Self Destruct) combusts in a supernova of static carnage - and in its wake softly croons the blithely nihilistic 'Piggy'. Although not exactly renown for lyrical adroitness, here Reznor delivers his prose straight from the heart; in doing so, he avoids giving the work too pretentious of a vibe and generates a vulnerable human contrast to the album's alienating coldness. When Reznor's protagonist is not shamelessly self-abasing and vulnerable (Mr. Self Destruct, The Becoming, Ruiner, I Do Not Want This, Hurt) he abandons himself unto the embrace of sexual oblivion (Closer, Reptile, Big Man With A Gun). Each wring down the spiral reveals another level of this character's dementia, and we are drawn closer step by step to his inevitable tragedy - be it interpreted as suicide (as the title track suggests) or meek helplessness (Hurt). Reznor is at one moment resolved in his abandoment - "Nothing can stop me now/ 'cause I don't care anymore" - and, in the other, nearly crippled by it ("there's no escape from this/ my new consciousness"). Reznor's outbursts of hopelessness and demand for meaning (I want to do something/That matters) are replaced by deviant lust and severe nihilism ("I want to fuck you like an animal", "smash me/ erase me").
However Spiral's lyrics are not merely self referential - the album is rife with references (both musical and literary). 'Heresy' spouts Nietzsche-influenced caterwauls while the album's only instrumental (A Warm Place) borrows directly from David Bowie's 'Crystal Japan'. Pigs are everywhere in this record, which could either be a reference to Golding's Symbolic Pig from Lord of the Flies or Charles Manson (Reznor recorded Spiral in the Tate murder mansion, after all.)
Musically, the record plays off of the relationship between loud and soft (much as, thematically, it plays off of light and darkness, purity and abasement). While the more visceral tracks are awash with distortion and the lighter tracks seem ethereally weightless, every song on the album (no matter it's mood) is crammed with layers. If there has ever been an album tailor made for headphones, it's The Downward Spiral; tiny noises, sound effects, samples, and musical phrases are scattered all across Spiral's terrain. This gives the record a haunted quality - as if, at any given moment, there's something hidden lurking just beneath the surface, buried deeply in the mix.
Spiral touches upon the darkest hues of human emotion. It spurns, it soothes, it affirms, it denies. At the album's end, we are left in a very similar state of how we began. As 'Hurt' creeps to its somber close, a jarring chord sounds out of nowhere, shattering the song's cadence and with it, our reflective reverie. The chord is left lingering atop the mix for an eternity, as if to say (as Bret Easton Ellis's serial killer Patrick Bateman asserted in American Psycho) "This confession has meant nothing." Well, maybe it didn't, but this thrashing, heaving mess of postmodernism has remained over the years as my favorite record of all time, and certainly one of the greatest albums ever made. I recommend it to anyone who's ever had a bad day (or, for that matter, a good lay).
No comments:
Post a Comment