First Impressions

I've noticed two new albums recently: Nine Inch Nails' long awaited With Teeth, and Garbage's reunion album Bleed With Me.

It's been almost six years since Trent Reznor released The Fragile, which is a long time to let anticipation build for an album. He's been talking about the state of music too; last year, he told Rolling Stone that he was coming back to wage war on the waves of shitty music currently populating the music world. Responding to criticism that The Fragile was too long by half, he described With Teeth as ten sharp punches to the face.

My first encounter with the music didn't live up to any of those expectations. The video for The Hand that Feeds was released on the internet several weeks ago, and it was completely underwhelming. The lyrics and melody seemed completely by the numbers: while it's true that Will you bite the hand that feeds you?/Will you stay down on your knees? is somewhat catchy, an occasional other lyric would really flesh the song out. The video itself combined all the excitement of a studio recording with a bunch of musicians sitting at the instruments with the edginess of a blue-tinted lens. It didn't even have Trent's Funny Antics like the video of March of the Pigs did.

A first listen to the album did little to reassure me. However, as I've kept listening to it, it's grown on me. While it never reaches the self-loathing intensity of The Downward Spiral or the complete depression of moments on The Fragile, there's a quiet acceptance and surrender in many of the track on With Teeth that can be just as moving. The final two tracks — Beside You in Time and Right Where it Belongs — are particularly strong in that regard, and none of the tracks are completely unlistenable. The album is Nine Inch Nails' weakest major release, and some of the lyrics are completely pedestrian, but it's still a cut above anything else on the radio these days.

My first impression of Bleed Like Me were the opposite. The video for Why Do You Love Me? captured much of the energy of many of Garbage's earlier "fun" songs, Shirley had finally abandoned the atrocious over-glammed blonde look she had sported for much of Beautiful Garbage (while it was perfect for Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go), that song wasn't the entire album). However, most of the rest of the album simply doesn't live up to that standard. The title track and It's All Over But the Crying are both up to the standard of Garbage's more introspective songs, Why Do You Love Me? is fun, and Happy Home is a serviceable closer. However, the rest of the album is completely uninteresting, and some lyrics (The boys wanna fight/while the girls are happy to dance all night) are nauseating. On Beautiful Garbage, Garbage found a number of interesting ways they could vary their sound while still remaining recognizable; with Bleed Like Me, they abandoned all of that for the same hard rock sound that I can get too much of on any Clear Channel station.

Trent Reznor was dead on target when he said that there is a lot of shitty music out there. Unfortunately, neither of these albums is ready to lead the counter-revolution.