Revisiting the Classics - “Pretty Hate Machine” (1989)
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
In 1990, a 17-year-old me went with some friends to an all-ages dance club, and amongst the predictable dance tracks were layered a few tracks from this up-and-coming kid from Cleveland whose debut had dropped the previous fall. The DJ was really flogging the tracks too. I wasn’t sure what to make of all of it.I wasn’t well schooled in the more underground stuff of the time, so I wasn’t really up on my Skinny Puppy or my 242. So this was all new to me. And I was kind of stunned by it all.
I asked a friend, and I can’t remember which one, who this was. “Oh, this is Nine Inch Nails” she said. Huh, I thought. I vowed to remember the name.
And then I promptly forgot about it for about a year.
Luckily, by the time I got to college, “Pretty Hate Machine” was pretty omnipresent, and I rapidly accumulated NIN singles , remixes and imports, and bootlegs (including the occasionally-hilarious “Purest Feeling” demos); I was going to NIN shows and wearing Head Like a Hole tshirts.
Trent was, like me, a scrawny little nerd who liked synthesizers, had a lot of welled-up teenage angst, and wore a lot of black. I could associate. I could get behind it.
20-odd years have gone by, and Trent Reznor is a muscle-y Oscar-winner who married a Filipino supermodel and still likes synthesizers. Yeah, okay, so maybe Trent and I have drifted apart a bit. He still writes sort of whiny lyrics, though.
Last year, Pretty Hate Machine got a remaster and re-release. The remaster is nice. Very clean, adds a lot of clarity and depth to the mix without changing much of it.
So, now that I can hear everything clearly, how has the intervening two decades treated PHM?
“Head Like a Hole” gets off to a good start, although the drum machines have a bit of that late-80′s “sampled drum machine” flair to them, although that seems to be making a bit of a comeback itself, so while maybe that SP-series grittiness isn’t exactly timeless, it’s at least “retro-cool”. The instrumental hooks are strong, particularly that bass synth riff. It doesn’t sound like much of what’s going on in music today, but it also doesn’t sound like what was going on in pop music back in 1989, either. Where it starts to break down a bit is in the chorus - it’s recorded fine, but the guitar sound chosen is very much the late-80′s “roll-off-all-the-low-end”, solid-state rectifier sound. It fits in with the song, sure, not taking up too much sonic space, but it immediately marks the track as being produced in the late 80′s.
After a brief sample-loop interlude, which has since been aped by every neophyte electro band ever since at some point (“yeah! Gunshots as snare drums! Nobody’s thought of that before!”), we get “Terrible Lie.” In a lot of ways, this one track presaged much of what NIN was going to do over the next decade. Teen-angsty, almost balladic lyrics making some stab at religion, lots of loud/quiet contrast, an infectious but dissonant hook that doesn’t come in until near the end - this is basically the model for many of NIN’s subsequent singles. This one works fairly well, although the lyrics seem even more goofily overwrought now than they did in the 90′s.
“Down In It” was a single that, when it came out, I really liked. “Hey! A nerdy white boy doing hip hop!” I thought. Now, I think “oooh, a nerdy white boy doing hip hop.” While the attempt is admirable, this particular flavor of industrial hip hop had already been executed better (although when I first heard the song, I didn’t know it) by contemporaries like Meat Beat Manifesto, and the song is a pretty direct crib of Skinny Puppy’s “Dig It.” It’s not.bad, exactly.but at this point Trent wasn’t really Chuck D and The Bomb Squad, so it comes off a little stilted and, dare I say it, quaint. I think it’s the bassline, primarily - there’s the urge to add “in West Philadelphia, born and raised.” to the lyrics.
“Sanctified” doesn’t get off to a much more auspicious start. The sampled slap-bass didn’t sound great in 1989, and doesn’t sound better now. The programming of the percussion is surprisingly detailed, though, and the whole song makes really nice use of stereo pan. There’s a lot of fiddly sonic programming going on here, unfortunately overshadowed by that insistent slap-bass loop.
“Something I Can Never Have” is teenage therapy-poetry of the most overwrought sort. I admit to writing stuff like this on the back of my 10th grade chemistry notebook. It’s silly now, but man, when I was 18, Trent was speaking to my deepest soul - and he dropped the f-bomb so you knew it was really edgy and tormented. There’s not a huge amount of complexity to this song, but what there is is quite well-executed. The piano samples are a little clangy, but basically if you added a few Christian overtones to this song it’d be a chart-topping Evanescence track now. I expected this one to age poorly, but conversely it’s sort of surprised me.
We get back into a strange area with “Kinda I Want To.” The bassline is very late 80′s, and sounds a lot like the infamous “LatelyBass” preset from the TX81Z. But then again, that late 80′s FM sound is drifting in and out of vogue again, so while this doesn’t sound current, again we get this sort of retro thing going on. We also get a snatch of an alternate “Down In It” that amps up the aggression. And we get a lot of knob-twirly tweaking of effects - the lead line gets the ever-living crap ring-modulated out of it. In the end we get a song that didn’t resemble much of what was going on in late 80′s music (Skinny Puppy and company notwithstanding) and while imitators have come along since then, they’ve sort of vanished since. NIN basically stands alone in that regard.
When it came out as a single, I liked “Sin” enough to design a font honoring it. After 20 years, it’s really not emblematic of Trent’s best work, but it basically serves as the template for a lot of the more popular “industrial rock” of the next decade or so. The chugging, percussive bass, the buzzsaw guitars, the slightly off-putting vinyl-scratch samples, the frenetic dance drums.it draws a lot from EBM and a squeezes it in with some noisy alt-rock. By 1995 it seemed like there were a dozen bands on pop radio doing stuff like this.
“That’s What I Get” takes us back into more familiar territory, with the cold digital percussive synth (PPG Wave, I think?) and the now-familiar detuned hook lead. Chuggy FM bass, woozy synth strings, effectron-style shifting echoes.basically, this sounds like a song off of Skinny Puppy’s “Too Dark Park” with all the distortion effects turned off. Another case where we didn’t really hear another track like this again but it clearly influenced things for a while.
The regrettable slap bass sample resurfaces on “The Only Time” and while it’s not as irritating as on Sanctified, probably because it seems to be layered with something punchier. The squashed snare drum now reminds me of the similar snare from NIN’s later mega-hit “Closer”, and “The Only Time” structurally sets the template for that track - in fact the detuned hook isn’t too far off from the one that closes “Closer.” Huh.
Everything wraps up with “Ringfinger.” I remember at first not being impressed with this track, then being really impressed and then settling back into a sort of mild appreciation tempered by the fact that every DJ I heard kept playing the demo “Twist” to show how cool they were. This one is well-programmed, but I can’t shake the fact that a lot of sounds on it scream early 90′s. Sure, this was one of the first songs to use some of them, but a cadre of imitators in the interim have fixed the track to a certain period. Structurally the song is pretty decent - a nice buildup/breakdown sequence, to a final climax that caps off the album (with a similar riff to the one from “Kinda.” There’s a lot of little fiddly bits going on in the background that I hadn’t really noticed until doing some closer listening on it, and that helps the song a lot.
The remaster adds the B-side cover of “Get Down Make Love” to the album, which unfortunately doesn’t add much. It’s a decent enough cover, but it feels tacked on to the album (because, well, it is). It sounds like what you’d expect NIN covering Queen to sound like - noisy, distorted, dancy, with lots of little weird sounds thrown in. The chunkier guitars in the chorus are a bit of a switch up, and demonstrate that maybe his subsequent material is going to have a little more heft (which it did, but we didn’t know that at the time).
Overall, one thing I don’t think I’d really noticed about Pretty Hate Machine at the time, was just how melodic and “poppy” it was. It was abrasive and scary in 1989 but it had a very solid pop/rock structure at the core of every song. There are very clear vocal melodies and hooks, the lack of which had really prevented “industrial” music from crossing over into the mainstream until that point. It bridged a lot of worlds. A lot of the sounds sound sort of dated now, but that’s always a downside of being on the bleeding edge - once everyone else catches on it becomes a cliché of the era or the genre, like the Alpha-Juno “Hoover” sound for rave or the dubstep wobble. Pretty Hate Machine, on further review, may never sound as fresh and exciting as it did to me in 1990, and certainly years in now I can recognize the spectre of Trent’s influences looming over the album much more strongly than I ever did then, but I can also recognize just how important and influential this album actually was to subsequent artists. Certainly, it influenced me strongly for years.