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By JEFF MAKI
It seems like its been forever since the last NIN record and well it has been. Trent is back and he hasn't changed much at all on With Teeth. The album as a whole is exactly what you would expect from NIN and maybe Trent meant it this way because it had been so long. With almost every release NIN seem to reinvent themselves in a way while still sounding like NIN. Reznor does do this somewhat here on this album, however it's no where near the reinvention as on previous releases. But if something isn't broke then why fix it? With Teeth has everything you would expect and come to love about NIN. There's Trent's dark and depressing lyrics, infectious beats, distortion, keyboards, and more effects than you can shake a stick at. There are faster and heavier sounding tracks like "Getting Smaller," and the distortion filled "You Know What you Are?" and "The Collector" There are also haunting ballads like "Love Is Not Enough" and "Everyday Is Exactly The Same." The first single "The Hand That Feeds" didn't really impress me a whole lot at first but after repeated listens it's now one of my favs on the disc. A standout track for me is "Sunspots," which is almost a pop sounding single and it may very well be. It has those infectious beats I wrote about previously and one of the catchiest backing synths I've ever heard in a song.
The disc flows rather smoothly and there are no fillers that I could hear. Every song seems to stand on its' own which seems to be rare with releases this day and age. Some of the disc sounds so simple while other parts sound so complicated your asking yourself: "How did he do that?" The album really caught on for me around the third listen or so and now I'm hooked. It's not going absolutely blow you away at first but that's usually a good thing. My favorite albums aren't always the ones that grab me right at the first listen. The best ones are those that have you back tracking through songs, listening to it every other day and after repeated listens you seem to hear something new every time you play it.
With Teeth is a solid album from one of the greatest artists of our time, but not an album that will change the face of rock and alternative music such as NIN's previous efforts did. The album as a whole though is classic NIN and will do nothing but further solidify Trent Reznors career with NIN. There are tracks from With Teeth that will fit in quite well with NIN's live set, which is one of the best out there and the album should be fairly successful, probably even more so than the last offering, The Fragile. Trent surprised us with this release by not really surprising us at all. This is just another solid and classic NIN disc retaining their pioneering industrial sound more than ever. Nothing wrong with that.
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