Sundays…good days to revisit albums not played front-to-back in decades, like those EMF and Enigma CD’s that scampered into my collection for a hot 1990s second, or better yet, all that industrial rock I flaked out on around the time Rob Zombie started making slasher flicks. My hiatus from industrial rock came to an end on a recent Sunday when I decided, after hearing Trent Reznor’s excellent soundtrack work, that it was finally time to give Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral another pass.
It's safe to say the experience of listening to the album The Downward Spiral now, compared to when I first bought the CD back in 1994, isn’t all that different. I was too much of a poser to admit it then, but I’m admitting it now: I’m a 5/10/13/14 track fan. A “Closer,” “A Warm Place,” “The Downward Spiral,” and “Hurt” kind of listener—so, predominantly the chiller tunes over the kinetic songs that sometimes hit me like dental tools on a chalkboard. And yet, even when picking around certain parts of the album, just to get to the bits I like, the totality of it still interests me—mainly because it tells the story from the beginning of an individual’s unraveling to the point of no return.
When I set out to write Nikki Come Home the course I charted was similar—an unrelenting unraveling that’s always moving, perhaps not in the most attractive directions, but that’s the thing with downward spirals: they do pretty in their own way. Just look at the NIN “Hurt” video that flipped corrosion around and made it beautiful in reverse with the rebuilding of a decaying little fox. As far as IRL moments go, after seeing that video live when the band kicked off their Further Down the Spiral Tour in my hometown, something clicked with me that I haven’t been able to unclick—witnessing a thing turn from recognizable to unrecognizable (the other way around in the case of “Hurt”) is a rather powerful thing to witness. It’s also a rather difficult thing to witness.
