Sooooooooooooo
After about five or six listens, I've decided that this is actually my least favorite NIN release, ever. I went into it not expecting a whole lot, mostly because I wasn't particularly into NTAE either—and I still found myself disappointed.
I didn't absolutely HATE it, but I would be lying if I said I enjoyed it to any substantial degree. I've never come so close to outright disliking a NIN release before—yet here I am, I guess.
Trent has this habit of naming his songs after things that I
don't want to feel about the record, and "Less Than" definitely fits the bill. In my opinion, this is easily NIN's worst single since "Only." To me, it essentially sounds like a more toothless, Diet Coke version of "Came Back Haunted" and "Copy of A"—which are great singles on their own—but they're watered down to a point where all the flavor is lost, and it just reeks of mediocrity.
It's cool that your friends seem to like it—but man, that track just gets worse every single time I listen to it. I'm sorry.
Seriously, though.
Try to find a single you like less than... it. I wish I could've avoided that pun somehow, but Trent's kinda forcing my hand here.
That all being said... it's actually my favorite song on the EP.
The rest of the tracks are passable from a quality standpoint—certainly better than the lead single in terms of structure and composition, but the "experimental" elements are either
too experimental, or not experimental
enough, and I still haven't really figured out which one it is for me. The songs aren't really as impenetrable as they were described to be—I could pretty much tell where every track was headed within the first verse, which made a monotony out of most of the tracks, especially "Not Anymore" and the closer.
"This Isn't the Place" is FINE, I guess, but I really can't stand it when Trent tries to sing in his upper register like that. It just doesn't sound good, and the lyrics certainly didn't make up for it either—in fact, I'm so familiar with Trent's lyrical patterns at this point that, when I listened to the song for the first time, I was able to predict almost every single rhyme before it was sung. But other than that, it's not a bad tune on this EP.
My ears did also perk up when I heard "everyone seems to be asleep" on your favorite track, though. I caught that reference from the first EP, so while I'm glad I'm able to see the vague connections between the two records, it's just a shame that I don't really like the music that much. It makes it all the more difficult for me to even
care to see the connections, and that's a pretty upsetting thing for me to type out.
The closing track, "The Background World," is my least favorite song. My first time listening through, I was eyeballing it in the tracklist the whole time, excited to listen to this assuredly challenging and dynamic 11-minute song to close the record off. So, after listening to four relatively mediocre songs that didn't offer me much, imagine my disappointment upon discovering that the 11-minute closing track is just another painfully average song that was fluffed up in length by an industrial loop that runs on for several minutes before the record ends.
I have no doubt in my mind that Trent knew exactly what he was doing with this EP, but whatever it was, it just did not go over well with me at all. This isn't the first time this has happened, though—I needed to give Year Zero about ten or twelve shots before I started to really appreciate the record, but even then, Year Zero has always been one of my least favorite NIN albums, and this EP is easily worse right now. It could change, but like I said before—no other NIN record has tested my patience more than this one has, so that's a major disappointment.
I said it before, but it feels like a record that's simultaneously trying too hard yet not hard enough at being experimental, and that's so weird, and it doesn't make any sense, but that's the best way to sum up the EP in my mind. I wasn't into the direction, wasn't really into the instrumentals, and I wasn't into the lyrics either.
If I had to give it a number, I'd probably give it something like a 4/10 or a 5/10. Nothing else has gone under a 6/10.
I'm glad you seemed to enjoy it more than I did, though. I don't want to change that. If anything, I want to like it as much as you do, but there just wasn't a whole lot for me here. But you know, oh well. Can't win them all—I was bound to dislike something NIN-related at some point, so this barely affects my opinion on NIN as a whole. He could've put out a record that's 10x shittier, and I'd still be a loyal fan. But above all, I'm just glad Trent's still touring making music.
Here's hoping the final piece of the trilogy blows the other two out of the water, or at least completes the picture.
And send me my Fragile Deviations already, goddamn. You're killing me, Trent.
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