Nine Inch Nails – Fixed
Trent Reznor loves remix albums; so much so that he even put out this set of remixes of an impassioned, ugly in-between album EP. As a follow-up to his well-received but highly synthesized and traditionally industrial debut Pretty Hate Machine, Broken was a shock to the system. In terms of industrial music, it had its earmarks in the bleakness of the lyrics and the programmed beats on the bottom, but the graphics of fire under the backwards 'n' were an announcement of something new, a reinvention in progress that was soon to turn industrial on its head and make it a sudden, surprising commercial prospect with the release of The Downward Spiral a couple years hence.
So where Broken was all nitroglycerin and an unbelievable blaze of guitars, Fixed returns many of its songs to a more normally industrial sound, reconfiguring them with a lot of cutting and heavier beats. It stands in opposition to the passion and bile of the album it reconsiders, as it says on the back, the songs 'appear in their proper form on the "broken" EP.' Fixed seems more than anything like a concession, neither artistically or commercially inclined, but a scrap to the fans of the older sound and a chance to play around in the studio with luminaries like Coil and Foetus. Is Fixed bad? No, not at all, but nor is it especially good or necessary.
The initial remix by Coil of the formerly explosive and ragged "Gave Up" holds all the emotion at arm's length, distorting, cutting, and pasting, throwing in some typically industrial sirens and synths, using the guitar mostly as washes of sound. Interesting if little else. The lengthy (9 minutes!) J.G. Thirlwell remix of "Wish" retains a bit more of the original song's grandeur, adding to it mechanical whirring and steam engine bursts, something which likely influenced the sound of The Downward Spiral. Reznor's own remix of "Happiness in Slavery" is titanic, a heavy, sweeping reinvention of the song, although it loses its direction part way through in the way that remixes have, that sense of 'where do we end this thing?' The remaining three tracks further alienate from their source material as atmospheric instrumental reconstructions out of bits and pieces, ugly and indirect experimental industrial noise.
Reviewed by jshopa Oct 01 2008
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