4 out of 5

Label: TVT

Producer: Adrian Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc, Hypo Luxa

As with the ‘Head Like a Hole’ UK version, sometimes less is more, and with the inclusion of one great non-album Track, the ‘Sin’ single becomes a pretty necessary addition to one’s NIN collection.

We get three mixes of Sin here which, frankly, aren’t all that different (we’re done with the cute naming conventions and have switched over to ‘Short’ and ‘Long’), but a couple things make it work – that the first mix presented, ‘Long’, pushes some of the background elements more up front, making the track more energized and nuanced than what I get from the album version – and then that we follow this up with a ‘Dub’ mix, essentially an instrumental dance-ized version.  The tracks start differently and though they share a beat, the ‘Dub’ is all buzzes and keys where ‘Long’ has a more prominent ‘drum’ track, so the cores of the songs sound different… solving the repetition problem of the ‘Down In It’ mixes or the extended ‘Head Like a Hole’ single.  Then we get a Queen cover – ‘Get Down, Make Love’, which, though apparently sort of a joke track, is incredibly badass and filthy and angry and has a great sample starting it out which, yeah, turns out to be from a porn, or course.  Things are rounded out with a ‘Short’ version of ‘Sin,’ which is pretty much what it sounds like, but coasting off the high of ‘Get Down,’ getting to hear ‘Sin’ again with vocals is just fine.

A little variation makes all the difference.