3 out of 5

Label: TVT

Producer: Trent Reznor, Flood, Adrian Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc, John Fryer

It’s always a tough call rating classic albums.  You can have bias against it – as I would’ve with NiN prior to ‘rehearing’ them through the most recent release, ‘Hesitation Marks’ – or the bias of its status going toward it, influencing you to say ‘well, I might not love it, but it’s supposed to be great…’

And the thing is, had you reviewed it at time of release – how would it have struck you?  Tear away (as much as you can) years of outside influence and try to listen to it as though all you have to go on is the music.  If the history leading up to the album is important – which you could say is the case here, as PHM was a definite departure from industrial music of the era – then that can factor in, but its not a must.  Though not everyone has access to patience to comb through said history (and again, would it have mattered at the time of release…), so who gives a duff and how’s it sound?

Pretty Hate Machine sounds surprising, both in comparison to the version Young Me had constructed in his brain back when ‘Head Like a Hole’ was fringe aggressive, angry stuff and NiN scared me a bit, and it’s also surprisingly layered for Reznor’s first album, which Current Me wasn’t expecting, thinking that that was part of Trent’s growth over the years.  Certainly not to suggest that there hasn’t been growth, as PHM is definitely rough around the edges and slips more often into high school poetry than should be comfortable (though the legions of influences please take note at Trent’s avoidance of swears for most of the tracks), and the layering used here isn’t quite so nuanced, still harkening back to a dance beat hook.  Most notably, though, is that the set obviously bears the hallmarks of the scattered producers / mixers with whom Trent worked (after self-recording a demo version and then farming it out to his production favs), making the identity and flow of the album somewhat disjointed.

Flood’s track hold out the best and start the disc out stunningly – ‘Head Like a Hole’ and ‘Terrible Lie’ balancing drone-like lyric structure (repeated verse-chorus)  and hovering in a topic realm that’s clearly cynical but not eye-rollingly so (again countering the images I had of black-clad kids singing along to ‘Head Like a Hole…’ which of course still happens, mind you, but there’s more to the words than I initially allowed) with wicked awesome mixing of loops, heavy beats, and a crunchy guitar.  The focus on song-over-electro-stomp was apparently what made this stand out from the industrial crowd, but the totally danceable low-end is still present and drives these songs to timeless status.  Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc have mixed results over the middle of the disc, which is where things just feel sequenced poorly.  Taken one track at a time, tracks 3-7 (‘Down In It’ to ‘Sin’) are all pretty good.  ‘Down In It’ is a totally gloomy groove, a good bridge from the amped up openers, but it leads into the downtime of ‘Sanctified’ and ‘Something I Can Never Have’, which desperately slow things down before the album seems to forcibly try to bounce back with the over-produced ‘Kinda I Want To’ and ‘Sin,’ which look forward to the angrier, sound-pummeling image of NiN offered by ‘Downward Spiral.’  Bringing lyrics to the fore over the course of these tracks displays some of Reznor’s easy-rhyme weaknesses, which get particularly slack on ‘That’s What I Get’ and ‘The Only Time,’ two fist-pumpers that are sonically interesting as shit (less disco than ‘Kinda’ or ‘Sin’) but stretch an adult listener’s connection to the themes.  Thankfully things close out epically with ‘Ringfinger’, which shift back to the metaphor-singed imagery of the opening songs, and slips back and forth between pop and aggression easily, acting as a nice summary of what came before.

So – at the time?  An interesting listen.  Something to hype you up for what would follow.  Now, looking back, its amazing at how much of Trent’s talent is evident here, as well as how this was somewhat lighter fare than I think our memories recall it (I can’t be alone in that).  It won’t be finding its way into frequent re-listens as often as ‘Hesitation Marks’ for me, but it by no means is a relic, offering up its share of tracks-to-remember.