4 out of 5

Label: Fader

Producer: Trent Reznor

If you take a look at the album’s credits, you’ll notice something: that Reznor’s name is all over this.  Additional production, production, music… to the extent that you could question how much of this is Saul and how much Trent.  But that’s not asked as a criticism – certainly almost every top 20 artist is having music or lyrics handed to them, and Williams has lyrical effuse in excess to spit at them masses.  And the genius here is in the collaboration.  A tour meet-up that bore the awesome fruit of Niggy Tardust, Trent’s excellent sense of production push and pull and balance of a beat seemed to toughen up Saul and force him to kick his more rambling narratives to the curb.  Rick Rubin let that run rampant and tried to have Saul be a Beastie Boys rap/rock star; the self-titled album showed a better grasp of song but was still tonally all over the map, with every strong point matched with those remnants of slam poetry ramblings, generally weakening whatever lyrical themes were building.  But the persona of Niggy is bold, forward, and focused, almost every track a blast of bilious cultural observation as filtered through the voice of Tardust.  Though the album seems to isolate, somewhat, its themes to those of race – ‘Black History Month,’ ‘Convict Colony,’ ‘Tr(n)igger’, if those song titles give you any indication – its part of Saul’s goal on the disc to run our stereotypes through the ringer, pausing with the slick ‘DNA’ to just revel in the effect of words and music and then opening up toward the album’s more open-ended latter half (‘Raised to be Lowered’) before coming back around to the X-Rated fuck-off of ‘The Ritual.’  It’s definitely a full experience – perhaps a little over-long to keep one enraptured all the way through, and definitely overwhelmed by its three-track anger-fueled opening barrage.  But this is the most focused disc Williams had released to date and, interestingly, provided the kind of lyrical fire that Trent’s more recent work lacked (except when dropping into gloomy stereotypes…).

The CD version (this was initially released digitally) has some bonus tracks, none of which are as solid as anything on the album and don’t sound mastered or mastered at the same levels as the album.  They also sorta ruin the flow of the disc (since the opening bonus track reuses the synths from track 12’s ‘No One Ever Does’)… but it’s the thought that counts.