Get ready for a mindfuck.
The year is 2022 AD. Power and greed have pushed the world into mass chaos and a militant-controlled United States has embarked in a nuclear war with Iran and North Korea. Meanwhile, bio-terrorist attacks have ravaged Los Angeles, Anaheim and Seattle, and in order to combat the side effects of these attacks, the U.S. government has been adding mind-numbing pharmaceuticals to the water supply—whose side effects may or may not be contributing to hallucinogenic reports of a ghastly giant arm, reportedly called ""The Presence,"" which reaches down to the Earth from the sky.
This isn't the work of a new Orwellian-inspired science fiction novel to just hit the shelves, but instead is the latest idea to spawn from Nine Inch Nails' mastermind Trent Reznor's warped brain.
NIN's latest release, Year Zero, uses these aforementioned hypothetical situations as a backdrop to tell the story of a planet Earth, ravaged by violence and pollution, pushed to the physical brink and steadily approaching the apocalypse. Year Zero marks the first time Reznor has tackled a concept album, and by honing in on different perspectives of various people to tell the story of Earth's destruction, Reznor has proven he is able to tell a complex, thought-provoking tale through the medium of music.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect about Year Zero occurred during the months leading up to the album's release. While touring this spring throughout Europe, the band has sent fans on a wild goose chase across the Internet in order to put the pieces of the album's puzzle together. NIN have purposefully highlighted certain letters on concert T-shirts, which ended up directing fans to various fake websites set up by the band, which cryptically described the downfall of society. The band also left USB drives with leaked tracks in various bathrooms in venues across Europe. Many of these leaked songs had extended sections of static on them, and various fans took it upon themselves to put these pieces of static through spectrographs, which first revealed pictures of ""The Presence.""
Year Zero opens with the militantly bombast instrumental ""Hyperpower."" The song's loud drumming and progressive layering of dark synthesizers, distorted guitars and sounds of people horrifically screaming makes the track a perfect opener.
The following track, ""The Beginning of the End,"" is driven by infectious drums and guitar, and by the album's third track, the fist-pumping ""Survivalism,"" it is very apparent that NIN have struck musical gold.
The highlight of the album has to be the song ""Capital G."" While the drumbeat on the tune is very similar to that in Michael Jackson's ""The Way You Make Me Feel,"" ""Capitol G's"" themes and thought-provoking lyrics (i.e.: ""I pushed the button and elected him to office / He pushed the button and he dropped the bomb), push the envelope more than anything Jackson could ever dream.
Also, noticeably missing on Year Zero is a lot of the Reznor's signature angst-filled screaming. Instead, during ""In this Twilight,"" Reznor stretches out his vocal chords and shows off how much of a surprisingly good singer he really is.
The biggest problem with Year Zero is that it feels a little top heavy. The first half of the album is pure genius, but much of the second half is layered with too much ambience and not enough structure. While songs like ""The Greater Good"" are hard to get through during the first few listens because oftheir ambience, eventually the entire album clicks together after multiple listens, and each song adds more and more to the underlying narrative of a corrupt leader and a corrupt church running a corrupt country into the ground.
With Year Zero, Reznor has not just put out a great political concept album, of which the likes we have not seen before, but through the album's marketing techniques, Reznor has also created a cultural phenomenon, which will undoubtedly be copied in the years to come.
