Album Review: Nine Inch Nails, "The Slip"

From a price-versus-quality standpoint, "The Slip" is the greatest album Nine Inch Nails [ tickets ] has ever released--considering that the price tag was a note from bandleader Trent Reznor that read "This one's on me."After parting with his record label last fall, the suddenly prolific and fiercely do-it-yourself Reznor surprised fans in March with "Ghosts I-IV," a self-released, four-volume instrumental collection; earlier this month, he one-upped himself by unexpectedly dishing out "The Slip" for free via his website."Ghosts" and "The Slip" follow last year's "Year Zero," which, independent of any pricing criteria, is the crowning sonic and conceptual jewel of NIN's catalog thus far--a distinction that makes it a tough act to follow.Granted, the ARG plot that couched the release of "Year Zero" made that album much more than a simple collection of music. Absent of that, "The Slip" feels comparatively thin.That thinness also extends into the new album's overall production, which, next to the industrial bombast of "Year Zero," is a far more stripped-down affair, heavy on guitars and live drumming. It is, by NIN standards, a fairly straight-ahead, no-frills rock album.Why compare "The Slip" so heavy-handedly against "Year Zero"? Well, Reznor had said at the time of its release that "Year Zero" was merely the first installment of a larger work, and that "Year Zero, Part 2" would follow. The promise of seeing the "Year Zero" storyline further play out, and of hearing more music as sonically complex as that found on "Year Zero," is a captivating prospect, and one that makes "The Slip" feel kind of like a pit stop.Taken on its own merits, however, "The Slip" is no throwaway.The 11-track collection is largely filled with whiplash-inducing, frenetic cuts, standouts among which are "1,000,000" and "Head Down," two songs that feature a flurry of shredding synthesizers and guitars anchored by drummer Josh Freese's 4/4 rock beat on a decidedly garage-band sounding drum kit.Freese's back beat also holds center stage on "Discipline," a rock song sprinkled with just enough pop seasoning to make it sound equally at home in both rock clubs and dancehalls. (Test your subwoofer with that thunderous bass lift-off just past the 3-minute mark.)Adding texture are "Lights in the Sky," a quiet piano ballad reminiscent of NIN's 1994 cut "Hurt"; "Corona Radiata," a lengthy, ambient cut into which "Lights in the Sky" bleeds; and "The Four of Us are Dying," an electronica-heavy instrumental number that seems to have found its way here from the "Ghosts" sessions.Though not a career milestone, "The Slip" does bear the distinction of being a high-quality, full-length album that the staunchly anti-record-label Reznor was able to deliver to fans on a whim and for free. Tough to find anything in that equation worth complaining about.