Nine Inch Nails: Things Falling Apart

The only phenomenon more surprising than the five years it took Trent Reznor to finish The Fragile, his follow-up to The Downward Spiral, was the highly anticipated album's commercial failure. Maybe its epic double-disc size scared off fair-weather fans, or maybe Reznor's electronic angst proved too ambitious and enigmatic for those who had moved on to the more immediate, less challenging pleasures of the rap-metal set. Either way, The Fragile's varied sonic palette still holds up more than a year later, resonating as both an impressionistic sonic collage and a collection of songs. Reznor, for his part, doesn't appear too concerned with the public's fickle tastes. The new Things Falling Apart takes some of The Fragile's tracks and roughs them up even more, tossing them to a pack of remixers that chews them up like dog toys. As with Nine Inch Nails' previous remix collections, Reznor often dissects his own songs, which not only hints at a sense of perverse creative masochism, but also acknowledges the constant mutability of modern electronic music. With mixer Alan Moulder, Reznor strips down "Into The Void," then rebuilds the song from the ground up. On-U Sound mastermind, industrial music dabbler, and longtime Reznor ally Adrian Sherwood trips out "Starfuckers, Inc." with some of his patented dub techniques, cloaking the track with oppressive grit and echo. Benelli's liquid version of "The Frail" is even more subdued than the album cut, leading perfectly to Dave Ogilvie's own fuzzy techno take on "Starfuckers, Inc." Adding extra value to the already budget-priced collection is "The Great Collapse," a funky but muted unreleased track from the Fragile sessions that surely had plenty of company in Reznor's vaults, as well as a clanking cover of Gary Numan's "Metal" that once again points to the synth pioneer as an industrial-rock precursor.