YEAR ZERO

Overall, this isn't a bad album. The music is still industrial, like before, but it is cleaner sounding and seems to be more accessible, even considering the sci-fi concept that it is based on. To me, the music looses a bit of credibility because of the cleaner sound, so it doesn't have the bite and the draw for me that "The Downward Spiral" or "Pretty Hate Machine". There isn't much in the way of prog here either, not that there was a lot before, but there were some elements. The rhythms are pretty straightforward. But there are a lot of nice surprises which is what one can expect from NIN. But I don't believe the music has progressed so much from the earlier albums. It's okay to have a cleaner sounding and more accessible record if you can do that while advancing your sound. The music remains pretty close to the same, and with the accessibility factor on this album, that tends to make it suffer a little.

Don't get me wrong though. I still enjoy most of the album. But it pales when it stands next to Trent's earlier work. There are still plenty of dynamic changes and nice passages. It mostly suffers because of the sameness of a lot of the music. Not the best representation of NIN ingenuity, but still pretty good. Unfortunately, I have to give it about 3 1/2 stars because of the lack of progression and I will round this down because of the way the accessibility washes out the credibility.