my voice just echoes off these walls

another week, another new, free nine inch nails album.

it's so strange - we used to wait five years between albums, and now in the space of a year we get three. i just finished my first listen now and enjoyed it. sort of.

i'm not complaining, mind you. used to be, though, i would spend those five years poring over those albums, extracting every nuance, grinning at the subtle, the refined, the way trent played the same style of music in a completely different way.

except i haven't even finished digesting ghosts (with which this disc sounds as if it will pair very well, btw). again, not complaining; this is more like too much of a good thing. it's just different, a different sameness. we aren't waiting five years and getting a different trent, like a letter from a long lost friend twice a decade, now-he's-an-angst-ridden-junkie, now-he's-an-anti-establishment-radical. we are seeing a more steady stream of thought. weird. a good weird.

as a result: the slip doesn't sound exactly like year zero, but they are certainly very similar, both in tone and artistic direction. some tracks could easily be mistaken as zero's b-sides (except corona radiata which is straight off the downward spiral, hot). there isn't a furious, gripping track, a blatant standout. nevertheless it is cohesive in a way the 90's stuff (and with teeth) never was; sharp and satisfying and compelling from start to finish, with none of the dreary, moody quiet you see in the tail end of the previous albums.

dave, doug, daniel and i got tickets to the lexington show in august and i'm excited to hear how these tracks work alongside the others. especially demon seed and 1,000,000 and corona. dang.