Trent Reznor excels at getting attention: A quarter-century into his career and just shy of the age of 50, he's maintained large public interest not only through the merits of a consistently risky catalog but also by couching his music in creative circumstances that the cynical might describe as stunts. Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero made its way into the world as part of a massive multimedia campaign that included a dystopian storyline, a video game, a remix album, an as-yet-unmade film and, famously, USB devices containing parts of the record left in European bathroom stalls. After exiting Interscope, he gave 2008's The Slip away, something he'd done a year earlier with his Saul Williams collaboration. Reznor turned the release of the expansive collection Ghosts I-IV into a series of referendums regarding the future of open-source content, the power of filesharing, and the potential for new models of physical record releases. How many more two-hour-long collections of instrumentals earn their own stories in The New York Times?
In February, Reznor and Nine Inch Nails again returned to the headlines. Less than four years after putting the project on hold and disavowing the road, Reznor proclaimed that Nine Inch Nails was "reinventing itself from scratch," employing new members for the stage and perhaps the studio. This year, according to Reznor, the band will make a run through America's arenas; next year, they will head to Europe. Perhaps the timing was mere coincidence, but appended to the end of most every story exalting the resurrection was notice that, in only two or so weeks, Reznor would release the debut LP from the band he started when Nine Inch Nails stopped, How to destroy angels_. That project, those pieces duly noted, is a collaboration with his wife, singer Mariqueen Maandig, Reznor cohort Atticus Ross and visual artist Rob Sheridan. These angles are the dreams in which publicist handbooks must come embossed.
Well, maybe not: Welcome Oblivion-- the 13-track, one-hour collection from How to destroy angels_-- isn’t the sort of record that will reinvigorate the latent devotion of Nine Inch Nails fans or, for that matter, recruit new faithful. Welcome Oblivion mostly maintains the elliptical electronic approach of last year's An Omen EP_, repurposing three of its songs and expanding on that short disc's mix of soft industrialisms, acoustic exotica, and instrumental expanses by simply doubling the number of tracks. At its best, Welcome Oblivion is undecided and unfocused, with moments of intrigue scattered through songs that wander on an album that rambles. At its worst, Welcome Oblivion is passé and redundant, suggesting recent successes by Salem, Burial, Laurel Halo, Purity Ring, Gold Panda, and a litany of others without improving upon them. All the hype, Coachella live debuts, and fortuitous timing in the world can't mitigate the feeling that, at last, Reznor's work has been bested by that of the relative youth he might've inspired.
Welcome Oblivion at least starts strong: The blistering glow of opener "The Wake-Up" balances a deep throb with melodic chirps and Maandig's expertly crisscrossed vocals. She spends the back half of the 100-second song working through a series of reversed and reordered syllables, eventually arriving at the beckoning question of "Is anybody listening?" Yes, actually: This auspicious introduction perfectly pits the band's power against the singer's poise.
But that union doesn't last long. Maandig often sings like a stand-in, with her pleasant voice politely holding the place for something greater. In the verses of the title track, for example, she shouts from behind a digital scrim, her voiced barbed and warped, much like Reznor in Nine Inch Nails. When the chorus arrives, though, she eases from the theatrics, settling into a coo that ruins the clamor. It's hard not to imagine Sleigh Bells' Alexis Krauss ripping through the same role with delight. "How Long?" leans toward sex and drama, with a ricocheting beat and icy keyboard line offering danger and seduction. Maandig tries to play the part, but the coquettish winks in the chorus feel like a game of childish dress-up. Despite a sudden volume boost, the Auto-Tuned chorus is diminutive and dismissible. At least it puts the imagination to work: How would Justin Vernon and Kanye West handle this mechanical motion, or Karin Dreijer Andersson?
These problems aren't Maandig's alone. Rather, they are symptomatic of a band that still hasn't settled on its style or aim. The final quarter of Welcome Oblivion, for instance, is the album's only largely instrumental chunk and an overloaded appendix. The motorik rise of "Recursive Self-Improvement" provides little but discursive filler on a record already unsure of what it wants to be, while closer "Hallowed Ground" offers an exultant comedown for an hour that has been neither cohesive nor compelling enough to warrant its own fanfare. "Ice Age", a banjo-and-noise vestige from An Omen, is once again an outlier that clears an inspired new path for the band; it goes un-followed. And the creeping "Keep It Together" initially slinks with the sinister mystery of the Tri Angle Records family, with Maandig and Reznor smoldering beneath a bass quake. But the back half of the song goes almost entirely to Reznor, who puts his voice between the cracks of the beat to illustrate the already obvious lyrics-- "I can't keep it together." It's hard to argue with him.
In light of Nine Inch Nails' imminent relaunch, the future of How to destroy angels_ remains a compelling question mark. After a promising first EP in 2010, the project now sounds stalled amid a flood of possibilities and ideas, each distracting and detracting from another. The thought of How to destroy angels_ being sidetracked, then, is a disappointing one, because this is the sort of band that could benefit from the same digital model it employed with its introductory EP-- put everything out all the time for free and online, until a favorable focus emerges. If How to destroy angels_ end here, though, they will remain a footnote ensconced in amber, the project Trent Reznor attempted to use to stay current but ultimately used to restart Nine Inch Nails.
