THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL

The sheer rage and anger which drove Reznor through the Broken EP gutters out into depressed self-loathing on The Downward Spiral. Lyrically speaking, the album consists half of the sort of statements which really cut to the heart of the experience of depression, and half of the sort of embarrassing tripe depressed people try to distance themselves from once they're out of their low. Musically, there are a number of strong tracks here - I particularly like Mr Self Destruct and A Warm Place - but Reznor's gear shift into a more metal-focused sound which by now has purged most of the dance music influences of the first two releases resulted in a lot of the album feeling like filler to me at first.

Fact is, Reznor protegee Marilyn Manson had already done the shock rock Middle America-baiting pop-industrial metal thing much better, and so tracks like Heresy and Closer don't seem transgressive to me such as petulant. That said, the second half of the album is substantially more interesting, once the initial rage peters out. (The pacing is particularly helped on the Japanese edition, which slots a cover of Joy Division's Dead Souls originally recorded for the Crow soundtrack in between Big Man With a Gun and A Warm Place - and it actually works quite well there.) And even the material earlier in the album has grown on me as we've gained distance from the early 1990s; certainly, if you want to encapsulate the "edgy goth" side of the 1990s, this album would be up there on your list.

I still consider Broken to be a far superior expression of essentially the same feelings, but at the same time I have begun to increasingly appreciate the greater technical capabilities Reznor displays here. There's a five-star EP in here weighed down with less helpful material or clumsy vocals here and there, but it still adds up to a four star album once you warm to it.