Zero Hour

J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle

by J. Edward Keyes

Of all the once-mighty mid-'90s artists foundering in the post-misery generation, perhaps none has seemed as hopelessly displaced as Trent Reznor. Two years ago, he released With Teeth, a hammer-handed misfire in which he attempted to prove his influence on a dozen lesser bands by making a record that sounded just like them. Bereft of animus and imagination, With Teeth ground out nu-metal riffs, its only rhythm being the sound of one man punching the clock.

Nine Inch Nails Year Zero (Nothing)

Gui Boratto Chromophobia (Kompakt)

So what stands out most about Nine Inch Nails' new Year Zero is its remarkable sense of restlessness. Reznor is back to fiddling with the architecture, force-decaying sounds and then building songs from the scraps. There's not a tone on Zero that's untouched: He bends and stretches the guitars in "The Warning," turns his own voice to chewing gum for the chorus of "Vessel" and manages to make a vibraphone sound ominous in "The Greater Good." It's a more rhythmic record than its predecessor; gone are the sawing guitars and brawny muscle-tee posturing, replaced by malfunctioning keyboards and 10-ton drum machines.

Reznor remains an artless lyricist, but on Zero he moves past cataloging his own debasements to more universal concerns. He constructed a post-apocalyptic alternate reality for the genius marketing scheme that accompanied the album, but the world Reznor is singing about turns out to be our own. "Don't give a shit about the temperature in Guatemala," he sneers sarcastically in "Capital G." "Ain't gonna worry 'bout no future generations/ I'm sure somebody gonna figure it out." For all its sudden sonic ingenuity, this is Year Zero's most alarming development: After 18 years of virulent indifference, the master nihilist has started to care.

The Brazilian producer Gui Boratto isn't as concerned about erosion, but his sparse, mesmerizing Chromophobia is as much about antimatter as it is about solid sound. Boratto works from minimal elements: He scatters tiny dance rhythms like pebbles and blankets them with gauzy, weightless synths. Reznor scrubs big sounds down to little ones, but Boratto does the reverse: "Terminal's"odd speckles of sound give way to a dense, zooming keyboard loop; the title track piles beat atop beat to frenetic effect. Call it techno ex-nihilo, an electronic creation myth.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)