I’m a huge Nine Inch Nails fan. I have been since the late 80s, when I visited a friend’s dorm room in UC Berkeley and he first played me the single “Down In It” from the album Pretty Hate Machine. Through 20 years of albums, I’ve loved nearly everything NIN has ever done. Nobody has been able to meld hummable, pop melodies to aggressive, electronic-drenched rock songs and industrial grooves the way Trent Reznor (songwriter/mainman/chief Nail) can.
Their first album, Pretty Hate Machine, was really the clarion call for a new kind of industrial rock. It had all the sonics and anger of the more underground bands like Skinny Puppy and Caberet Voltaire but with a more synthpop, and dare I say, mainstream sensibility. And I always loved that about NIN, and specifically about Pretty Hate Machine. What can I say, I like my anger, despair, and electronic dronescapes to have melody, too.
Given both the limitations of mid-80s digital technology, and the limitations of Trent Reznor’s budget, Pretty Hate Machine, for all it’s classic songs (Head Like a Hole, Down In It, Sin, Something I Can Never Have, etc) didn’t sonically age quite as well as other NIN records. However, all these years later, after lawsuits and rights transfers and all sorts of sordid NIN history, Pretty Hate Machine is finally been remastered and being re-released by Trent’s label on November 22nd, 2010!
Honestly, I can’t imagine a record I’d more want remastered and sonically enhanced. I’m not a “purist”—I want it to sound the best it can, not like it did on a dusty record player 22 years ago. I’m thrilled about this, and I think that all NIN fans probably are too—so consider this post my part in viral marketing this record for NIN. And if you’re not a NIN fan, but have been curious, this is the album to start with—especially the sonic remaster.
Amazon.com Preorder (yes, I’m this excited!) below:
I hadn’t heard about that, consider the your viral contribution a success.
I recently bought the downloads for Robert Plant’s “Now and Zen” remaster to replace my glitchy CD rips and they did an excellent job. They rebalanced the high and low end so that it didn’t have than obnoxiously bright sound any longer. PHM suffers from the same issue so I’d love to hear a remastered version.
Interestingly, Now and Zen was the very first CD I ever bought! My CD ended up getting glitchy on “Sixes and Sevens,” the last song, probably from surface scratches. Perhaps I should get the remix digitally too. Thanks!
Of course, looking at Robert Plant’s CDs, I realize that it was Plant’s *previous* CD, “Shaken & Stirred,” that was my first CD which got glitchy on Sixes and Sevens. Whoops!
I just checked iTunes and there is a remastered version of that “Shaken” as well. After listening to the preview of all the tracks I realized that I know all of them and must have owned this album in some form. I like it quite a bit better than Now and Zen.
You will need to ignore the bonus 2006 remix of Little by Little. It sounds like it was done in 1992 with all the gated reverb and crap. I do often like remasters of early CD releases but I abhor remixes done years later that use the production-du-juer. There was a ZZ Top album released in the 90s that was like this and it was simply awful.