Three 65, Day 20
Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile

I really, really meant to start covering Nine Inch Nails' albums with the Broken EP, their second record (and finest distillation of their sound), but after listening to The Fragile on a drive earlier today, changed my mind. Considered by critics to be NIN's worst album, and lambasted by the musical press at large, the fans still love it, and so do I.

The Fragile was a turning point for Nine Inch Nails (which is basically the recording name for one man, Trent Reznor). Coming off of the previous album, The Downward Spiral, it seemed like things couldn't get any more hopeless. In contrast to that nihilistic record, The Fragile is (a little) more optimistic. Both "We're In This Together" and the title track hint at the possibility that things might work out.

But elsewhere, shit remains bleak. "Somewhat Damaged" is a stop-start anthem for the disenfranchised, with Reznor screaming "Where the fuck were you?" towards song's end. "The Wretched" is furious in its self loathing, "No, You Don't" shreds itself to pieces, and "The Great Below" is as dark as NIN gets. On the second disc, Reznor laments "try to save myself but myself keeps slipping away" on "Into The Void" and retains his anger at the outside world on the immortal "Starfuckers, Inc."

Of note is the abundance of instrumentals that fill (some would say pad, but I disagree) out this album. Most of them, like "Just Like You Imagined" and "The Mark Has Been Made," are like Reznor's other instrumentals: variations on a basic theme, spiraling outwards into complexity before returning to their root sound at the end. But "La Mer" and "Pilgrimage" step outside of that zone, the former being a piano ballad and the latter sounding like Nazis on the march.

The album is a concept record; it chronicles things falling apart, the collapse of systems. Unlike many such records, there is no concrete resolution at the end - if anything, the protagonist (if there is one) dies at its conclusion, on the instrumental "Ripe (With Decay)." Nine Inch Nails was never about easy answers or conflict resolution, so if you're looking for the type of conclusion that bookended, say, Pink Floyd's The Wall, you'd best look elsewhere.