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Daft said that drugs can positively influence, not that they create talent. Talented people are born that way. Bloc Party and Kasabian are stuff for people like you. I repeat for the umpteenth time, you’re missing hundreds of essential listens, so please don’t talk.

Trell it's the same ;-) The "se" ("ci" in Italian) either you put it before or you put it after, in the borgata they definitely understand you.

For this album, I'm ready to go all in... a concentrate of pure MERAAAAAAL! Prowler and Phantom Of The Opera are smashing! Dickinson, watch and learn!

Unkle69 my friend, you didn't use the term pompous, but as we say in Rome, "famose a capì". You clearly implied that I would be snobbish in my approach to this album because I wouldn't be able to appreciate its "modernity," emphasizing that my argument wouldn't make sense (based on what criteria exactly? Who knows). Then you quote my posts, but... for what reason? What do you want to highlight? I remember my posts too, I’m not that out of it X-D If you read them all in a row, I think a clear coherence emerges.. I really don’t understand where you are trying to go with this, I fully stand by what I've written before. The fact that the album is "good by default," here too, famose a capi: you start from the premise that it must necessarily be a valuable album just because it's labeled Trent and because there's a "sought-after" formal/aesthetic quality that I honestly couldn't care less about.. finally, the story about the packaging being ONE of the criteria to judge Ghosts, you brought that up, not me! "If good music is accompanied by pleasing graphic embellishments, photographic or cinematic insights even better"..."I care that it's good music, well made, well packaged (why not?)"... Are those my words or yours? Here, it seems to me that the real Berlusca is you, I haven’t mixed anything up at all!

Excellent review and proposal!

To be fair, there are also potentially enjoyable elements, especially in Ghost I and III, but due to the reasons mentioned above, they needed to be better utilized and with less approximation. Instead of 36 pieces, they could have made many fewer and focused on a maximum of 10-15 pieces.

No unkle69, the problem is that you keep pretending not to understand the main point of my argument. First of all, I already said that I love the NIN up to The Fragile (which I consider a nice album, even if not a masterpiece), and that implies that I also love TDS, a true non-modern masterpiece, rather post-modern, one of the peaks of 90s rock. Now how can you implicitly reproach me for having the classicist arrogance that tends not to understand and appreciate, let’s say, alternative works? But if I told you that the "classic Rock'n'roll" of the Stones (for example) doesn’t blow me away precisely because it's too classic for my taste... you see that it’s exactly the opposite of what you say. Then you start from the assumption that Ghosts must be a nice album by necessity (I don’t know who would have decided that), and to support your thesis you get to say that "it's a nice album for how it's packaged"... now come on, let's not joke around, I didn't want to dwell on it before, but this statement of yours is literally nonsensical, not mine. If we start judging an album also by the covers and how it’s packaged, we're in trouble! But let's look at the music, which is what matters! Another confusion you make: where did I say that for me what is simple is banal? I never said that! It is far from me to say such nonsense... I was making an argument about artistic conceivability, not technical execution. For me, many tracks from Ghosts are banal not because they are technically simple, but because they are predictable on the level of expressive fantasy, which is different. It seems to me an album, overall, haphazard, thrown together, poorly improvised and, as I explained before, boringly stereotyped. The funny thing is that at first glance it might seem like an album that requires numerous listens to be "fully understood", but for me there’s little to understand, little to discover... they're abstractly minimalist instrumentals and ends in themselves (for most of the pieces), which do not add anything significant to the NIN universe.

But if I am called upon more or less explicitly by other De-users, how can I be a pain in the ass!? I simply respond. Then, what does it matter that Trent has an enviable recording studio? What the hell does that have to do with the discussion about Ghosts? We're talking about the album here, not about my Yamaha compared to Trent's apocalyptic bunker, but why is there always a need to divert from the main topic? Who knows. Especially since Trent has such vast resources, he could use them in a more intelligent way.

Daft, but weren't you taught the use of commas in school? Stream of Consciousness style?

Well, if the album is lacking, let's not say we weren't warned by the title though! X-D