Nine Inch Nails
The Fragile

THE REVIEW

It’s time for (re)evaluation even for the many, too many overrated albums of the nineties when it was thought that the formula for making innovative music consisted of combining elements of different genres: crossover. Not that the idea was completely wrong, but often the artists in question limited themselves to taking these elements, often in contrast with each other, and simply throwing them into a melting pot without worrying in the slightest about blending them together; the poor result was also contributed to by the fact that the borrowed elements were often the most stereotypical of the belonging genre, so the result obtained was indeed innovative but paradoxically also a collection of musical clichés: identical metal riffs, recycled rap, third-hand techno etc. etc.

Within the '90s crossover scene, we can not only place Rage Against the Machine, Faith No More, Atari Teenage Riot, H-Block and partly Prodigy but also Nine Inch Nails by Trent Reznor, authors of a mishmash incorporating metal, dark, techno, hard-rock and at least concerning the magnificence of certain tracks also progressive.
The epitome of their work was “The Fragile”, a work hard to beat in terms of pomp, excessive length, and dispersiveness.

There are good insights, but the whole thing is spoiled by excessive verbosity and penalized by Reznor's voice perpetually set on the "damned soul" model and very limited technically, so much so that it never manages to find a valid alternative to the usual desperate scream or the restless whisper. The single "Starfuckers Inc." then wouldn't even be that bad but is constructed along the lines of the old "Mr. Self-destruct." It seems that Reznor waited a long time for the album's release due to opposition from the record label, which perhaps this time was not entirely wrong: maybe we would have been spared two hours of boredom.