As he concluded in The Downward Spiral, if God is dead then each and every one of us is nothing but a “Knuckle dragging animal… With out snouts in the dirt”.
“Ahead of Ourselves” continues the saga of Trent Reznor’s bitter agnosticism that has compelled him throughout his career, with a tossed off couplet where the irony hides bitter pain: “Better be proud of his work/That is if He existed (not so sure anymore)”. Things only descend further into darkness from there. at the end of the world and they know it? The pounding drums and screeching that form the backdrop to those words tell us the answer, which is: definitely not. That last line jars – does he really feel all right, like R.E.M. He sees, and repeatedly chants at the end of the song to rub our faces in it: “New world/New times/Mutation/Feels all right”. And the lyrics are equally bleak: Reznor looks at himself in the mirror and sees not just a new face that he doesn’t recognise, but a new world behind it his own turmoil and the world’s are combined. The speed and scuzzy rage of the opening “Shit Mirror” sets the black tone, an ugly yet familiar mix of electro- and industrial-rock that has been Nine Inch Nail’s calling for decades now. Just as 2007’s Year Zero obliquely criticised the Dubya administration with its sci-fi dystopian narrative, Bad Witch evokes the despair of liberals in the age of Trump without ever calling the president out by name (although the title of the album refers to the “witch hunts” that Trump doesn’t care to shut up about, and can also be shortened to one particular “B” word that completes the sentence “Son of a _”).
#Are you a good witch or a bad witch song remux full#
Marketed this time as a full album rather than an EP, despite being only 6 tracks and 30 minutes in length, Trent Reznor seems to be signalling that this one is operating at a higher level of ambition (although perhaps he was just frustrated with the lack of attention garnered the previous EPs). As global events have progressed on their downward spiral, 2018’s Bad Witch is inevitably the bleakest of the lot. This is the third in a trilogy of EPs from Nine Inch Nails that started with 2016’s forgettable Not the Actual Events and continued with 2017’s also forgettable Add Violence.
0 kommentar(er)
