August 5 - Head Like A Hole

When Nine Inch Nails (NIN) stormed onto the industrial music scene in 1989, Head Like A Hole, the lead off track on their debut was a ferocious display of texture, aggression, and melody. The synthesized backdrop creates the perfect canvas for Trent Reznor's sense of melody, delivered with just the right amount of attitude and aggression before it all explodes in the chorus. Watching the video is quite interesting, especially seeing Reznor with dreadlocks - his current public persona is far more clean cut. This was the beginning of a fascinating musical career that I am thankful I get a chance to follow. Head Like A Hole was a moderate alternative hit, although it did not make it on to Billboard's Hot 100 list. The album Pretty Hate Machine is a good debut, but it was clear that there was more lurking underneath the surface. Regardless of that, Head Like A Hole was a great introduction to Nine Inch Nails!

April 16 - Hurt

In a sense, this is Johnny Cash weekend. However, I will not play his originals, but rather play two album closers that he covered as part of his American Recordings series. Both of them were stellar in Cash's interpretations, but the originals are oh so good as well. The first is Nine Inch Nails' Hurt from The Downward Spiral. I didn't pick up the album right when it was released, but the year after I was living in Bergen at Fantoft Student Village, a mess of more concrete than glass, but the small apartments were still pretty cozy. It was a rainy day, which really isn't too uncommon in Bergen - the rain clouds rolling in easily stop when they reach the city's seven mountains, keeping the city covered in wetness the majority of dates (apparently an average of 202 days per year, according to Wikipedia climate data). I had a little bit of time to kill close to the bus terminal, so I walked to Marken, a very quaint little street, and found a small record store that at least used to be there.

Anyway, I do remember picking up The Downward Spiral there. The songs were brutal and more synth based than I was expecting - but I hadn't really listened much to Nine Inch Nails yet and Head Like A Hole had not reached me at that time in my life. Some tracks were standouts - Closer is still one of my absolute favorite tracks from the album - but after almost a full hour of aggression, the closing song provides a perfect ending to the album. Hurt is still incredibly painful to listen to, but for me, this pain is cathartic. Trent Reznor was reaching rock bottom when he wrote and sang Hurt, and you can clearly hear it in the lyrics.

January 23 - Final Solution

All rules are there to be broken - and I am about to break one of my own rules, as the song I am about to share has not been officially released in this particular version - however, it needs to be (Trent Reznor, are you listening?). In 2005, Nine Inch Nails had released With Teeth, and ten years after they went out on tour with David Bowie, for the summer amphitheater part of the tour in 2006, they invited the legendary goth (in my mind, the goths of the 80s are todays emo kids) band Bauhaus with them, along with relative newcomers TV on the Radio. The electronica/performance artist Peaches was the final support act.

However, Trent Reznor must have gotten along splendidly with Peter Murphy, the lead singer of Bauhaus, because throughout the tour, they had several sessions recording and performing songs they had written themselves, as well as cover versions of songs by Iggy Pop (their version of Nightclubbing is outstanding), The Normal and Joy Division - and then there is Final Solution, originally by Cleveland avant-garage (their own description) band Pere Ubu.

When I first heard the song Final Solution, it was sung in the very particular Swedish dialect found in Skåne. Skåne is one out of two places in the world I have been asked if I wanted a Coke with my meal at McDonalds and not been quite able to understand what I was asked - the other place that happened was in Scotland, which should give the English speaking reader some idea of what Skånsk sounds like compared to Swedish. When I heard the song, I was working in Studentradioen in Bergen, and the people I worked with there was completely up in arms over the Swedish band Bob Hund (Bob Dog). I tried my best to like them, but in the end, there were only a few songs of theirs that really clicked with me, and Et Fall Och En Lösning was one of them. There is a good chance that one of the reasons Bob Hund didn't quite work for me was that I never saw them live, as their live shows were things of legend, but nevertheless, they weren't quite my thing.

Fast forward quite a few years, and I decided to look up the song. First I had to remember that Et Fall Och En Lösning was a cover version. Then I figured out it was by Pere Ubu. And then I used YouTube to find the song. I had to sift through WWII documentaries and crappy "melodic death metal" to find Pere Ubu's version - but then I stumbled across Trent Reznor with Peter Murphy and TV on the Radio from their 2006 Radio Sessions. While I still think there is something about Bob Hund's version that really resonates with me, the version below is now probably my final version of the song. Peter Murphy did his own version of the song back in 1986 on his album Should the World Fail to Fall Apart, but this version is, in my opinion superior to it. However, I will let you judge for yourself - here are Peter Murphy, Trent Reznor, and TV on the Radio:

January 22 - Index

We're only about three weeks into the new year, and I am expecting the second really great album of the year. Steven Wilson is releasing 4 1/2 today, a collection of songs recorded over the past 4 1/2 years that didn't quite fit on his albums. Since his quality has been outstanding on all the records released in this timeframe, I am convinced that this will be a great album as well.

The thing that really impresses me about Steven Wilson is that he has a spectacular command of musical history, especially within more progressive rock, yet he continually moves his music forward. He is great with a song structure where there is stark contrasts between chaos and harmony, and he collaborates with spectacular musicians. At first, I was worried when I saw that Gavin Harrison wouldn't play drums with him - but then I discovered Marco Minneman. In short, his band is absolutely spectacular, which is why today's song is an officially released live track.

Index is a song that to me shows that he has taken massive cues from one of the giants of progressive rock. The mood of this song is to me very similar to the mood Peter Gabriel often was able to evoke, and I am in particular thinking about Intruder here. Also, playing the chord structure over and over again while adding and subtracting elements is sometihng Mike Oldfield did on Tubular Bells, but it is here drawing even more from Trent Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails, such as the ending of Closer - yet here it is all Steven Wilson. The song Index was originally on the stellar Grace For Drowning album - but here it is from the Get All You Deserve dvd, which is well worth owning!