THE SLIP

2008 saw the release of The Slip, Trent Reznor's seventh full length studio album under the moniker Nine Inch Nails. Being an industrial sounding album, The Slip features lots of fierce synth sounds, heavy and rough guitars and an overall dark and harsh feel. Also very notable are the pounding drums that take a very dominant role on this album.

I must say that I have some mixed thoughts about The Slip. The album overall is quite good and features some great moments, of which some for example the fierce "Letting You", the much more delicate "Lights In The Sky" and the electronic "The Four Of Us Are Dying". The problem that I have with this album is that it sounds somewhat repetative at times. Part of this is due to the fact that the majority of songs on the album open with pounding drums that soon get joined by synths, bass, guitar etc. This gives the album a somewhat blank feel at times. I find it hard to say, but sometimes the album seems to lack inspiration. Things might sound a bit expectable at times, but despite this the music still if pretty enjoyable. The album opens pretty fierce and agressive, but on the second half of the album significantly slows down with some more atmospheric tracks, only to close the album again in a heavy and aggresive manner.

The Slip is very far from being a masterpiece, but it is a good album nevertheless. It features some great moments, both agressive and rough to gloomy and ambient. Also, Trent Reznor has released this album as a free legal download, which means you can't go wrong getting it.

The Slip finds Trent Reznor in an uncharacteristically bad mood - and why shouldn't it? Having finally untangled himself from the contract tangle he'd been caught up in ever since the Pretty Hate Machine era, and having won critical acclaimed and proved that he could do without a record company altogether with the superb Ghosts I-IV release, things were looking pretty bright at this point for him.

The Slip, I think, is meant to be an expression of that. The title is clearly meant to refer to how he gave the record companies "the slip" and escaped their clutches; on top of that, this is some of the most outright happy music Trent's ever put out. Sure, there's still his breathy, angsty vocals, but those beats don't lie: this is a bouncy NIN party album.

Apparently it was originally meant to be an EP but Reznor found himself on a creative roll and ended up making it a full-length; to be honest, I'd say that whilst it's a fun industrial dance album it's no Pretty Hate Machine, so perhaps a bit of editing back down to EP length might have been called for. To be honest, at this point I think it was pretty clear that Reznor's creativity was far more in tune with the ambient soundscapes of Ghosts than the pop-industrial of his past - and his critically acclaimed soundtrack work in collaboration with Atticus Ross since then for The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo rather bears that out. At the same time, I can't hold The Slip against Reznor too much, since he did at least release this as a free download.