The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nine Inch Nails · Trent Reznor · produced by Trent Reznor and Alan Moulder · Nothing and Interscope · two discs, Left and Right, twenty-three tracks, about 103 minutes
Mode
Industrial rock turned toward length, texture and quiet; songs and instrumentals in alternation, built as a soundtrack to a mind
Mythos
The descent and the return: a fall, a pilgrimage, the sea and the great below, then the way out named; the beloved as the frail thing to be kept
Phase
Two discs: Left goes down from a fall to The Great Below; Right opens on a climb built in layers, falls back into mid-tempo songs, and ends in a slow coming apart
Presentation
Album; two compact discs, Left and Right, twelve tracks and eleven, about 103 minutes, as first released in 1999; seven or eight tracks wholly or chiefly instrumental
Register
Treated guitar, programmed rhythm and noise beside piano, acoustic guitar and a wordless choir; a voice from whisper to shout; a few lines spoken in French
Scale
One consciousness in collapse and attempted recovery, a beloved, the pact of two; addiction, grief, and fame seen with contempt
Governing Proposition
Five years after the record that made industrial rock a mass form, its maker turns from compact assault to length and quiet, and builds a double album as a descent and a climb: a self that has collapsed holds on to the one thing it has not ruined, and finds that recovery comes only by going through the damage. Sound carries what the words leave general, beauty kept alive under the noise that would end it. The making is the record’s plainest strength; the second disc, which should climb, falls back into songs the argument permits rather than compels.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a picked acoustic line and builds on it, layer by layer, into full assault. Somewhat Damaged is the fall that everything after it lives after, and its title is the record’s first statement of its condition: a self that has collapsed. Then comes The Day the World Went Away, the aftermath, sung under a choir of wordless syllables over a held wall of guitar, loss raised to grandeur. The first two tracks set the scale of the whole, a fall and what comes after it, and the rest of two discs is spent in the after.
Nothing Records and Interscope released The Fragile on 21 September 1999, as Halo 14. Trent Reznor and Alan Moulder produced it. It came about five years after The Downward Spiral (1994), and it was made in New Orleans. It is a double album: two compact discs, titled Left and Right, twelve tracks and eleven, twenty-three in all and about 103 minutes, the discs near equal at around fifty minutes each. Seven or eight of the tracks are wholly or chiefly instrumental: The Frail, Just Like You Imagined, Pilgrimage, La Mer, The Mark Has Been Made, Complication and Ripe (With Decay), with The Way Out Is Through mostly instrumental under a short sung refrain.
The expected sequel was another compact assault. The Downward Spiral, at 8.4 on this desk, had made industrial rock a mass form, and the record that followed it turned away toward length, texture and quiet: piano, acoustic guitar, a third of its tracks without song, passages built as soundtrack rather than as rock. A double album of 103 minutes, after five years of silence, into a market moving toward nu-metal and teen pop: the stake was real, and the cost came at once. The record fell from the charts within weeks and was taken as indulgent. It has since been revalued as its maker’s richest work.
Movement II
The Frail is a piano piece, short and exposed, and The Wretched follows it with grinding self-contempt, the piano figure of The Frail returning beneath. The pair is the record’s physics in small: beauty always under pressure from noise, the piano the fragile thing the treated guitars threaten. Then the title track names the beloved as that frail thing, to be protected, and lifts into a tenderness the production makes vast. We’re in This Together makes of two damaged people a pact against the world, and climbs to a chorus that is triumph and desperation at once.
What the record knows can be stated. A self that has collapsed tries to hold on to the one thing it has not ruined, and the holding is the only hope it has; and recovery is not a turn but a passage, made by going through the damage rather than around it. Sound says this as fully as words. The piano figures keep breaking through the noise, and the instrumental passages carry what the voice cannot: beauty kept alive under the pressure that would end it. That is more than a mood.
It is less than an articulated condition. The words are general to the point of interchangeability, you and I and this and it, and the condition is rendered as desolation and clutching more than it is said. Addiction and grief are present as weather; I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally names the wish to die in its title. The words do not reward a second look, and a return to them finds little not heard the first time. What the record knows, it knows chiefly in sound, and that holds its disclosure well below the summit.
Movement III
Just Like You Imagined is the dreadful sublime without a word: a fast piano figure under drums and massed guitar, driven to a peak. It is one of the places where the voice drops out, and the alternation of song and instrumental is the record’s way of knowing. The instrumentals are where the self cannot speak, and when the voice goes the music says what words have failed to. A single record of songs would lose this. Pilgrimage, a march without words, follows soon after, and the descent of the first disc goes on through it.
The making is the record’s plainest strength. Reznor and Moulder build a sound of very many layers that stays legible: in The Day the World Went Away the choir, the held guitar and the voice each sit at their own depth; in Just Like You Imagined piano, drums and guitar mass without mud. Guitar is treated until it is texture, small sounds sit under the large ones, and the layers repay close listening again and again. Across 103 minutes the dynamics run under control from near silence to full saturation, and the joins between tracks are made, not left.
The faults lie in the songs rather than in the sound. Several songs rest on riffs and refrains that the arrangement dresses more than develops, and the vocal writing and the words are plainly below the making of sound. No, You Don’t, on the first disc, is a lesser song in the register of its neighbours. The instrumental tracks have since been issued on their own, which shows that the textures hold attention without the songs; it shows too where the record’s strength lies.
Movement IV
La Mer is a piano line over brushed rhythm, with the sea in its title and a few lines spoken in French by a woman’s voice, and the singer gone. It is height by withdrawal, and the self’s silence is the record’s centre of tenderness. Its quiet is as exactly made as the noise elsewhere, and it obeys the same law as the assault at the close of Somewhat Damaged: both are the same frailty, once exposed and once overwhelmed. Across a range from near silence to saturation, from ambient instrumental to industrial song, one physics holds.
The Great Below rises out of it, slow and drowned, and closes the first disc. Left has gone down: a fall, an aftermath, a pilgrimage, the sea, and last the great below. The title echoes the phrase with which the Sumerian descent of Inanna begins in its usual English rendering; whether the echo was meant cannot be known, and the frame does not depend on it. The descent is built by the disc and its titles, whatever the source of the phrase.
Then the second disc opens on The Way Out Is Through, the ascent named, and the record builds the climb in sound: layer added to layer until an arrival, perhaps the record’s summit. The turn from the last track of Left to the first of Right is the record’s argument made as structure. The way out is through, and the through takes a whole disc. Nothing in the words says this as exactly as the change of disc does.
Movement V
Right does not sustain the climb. After The Way Out Is Through it falls back into the mid-tempo industrial song: Into the Void and Where Is Everybody? lean toward funk and groove, Please and The Big Come Down restate the mode without turning it, and height comes less often as the disc goes on. Perhaps a fifth of the running time is permitted rather than compelled, and most of it is here. This is what holds the record below the next tier: a frame that needs both discs, and a second disc that does not need all of its songs.
Starfuckers, Inc. is the record’s one turn outward, a sneering satire of celebrity, and the place its law breaks: contempt aimed at other people in a record otherwise inward. It is also the only place the social world enters, and it enters as a target. What the record holds is one consciousness, a beloved, a pact of two, addiction, grief and the wish to die, and its length deepens that one order rather than widening the set: no family beyond the pair, no labour, no state, no history, and nature only as the sea in an image.
Ripe (With Decay) ends it, a slow coming apart that gathers the record and lets it go. The frame closes as ruin rather than as return, which is honest, and leaves the myth half built. Twenty-seven years on, the record survives whole, in print and reissued, and is kept in its maker’s live sets; its instrumental grammar led on to Ghosts I to IV and to the film scores of Reznor and Atticus Ross. It stands a tenth below The Colour of Spring, at 8.0, another record that turned its makers toward texture and quiet, and level with Ágætis byrjun, at 7.9, another long, slow record of 1999.
Act III · The Twelve
Twenty-three tracks in about 103 minutes, and a double album is asked the subtractive question harder than a single. Parts are required. Somewhat Damaged must open, a picked acoustic line built into full assault, the fall the rest lives after; The Day the World Went Away must follow, the aftermath. The Frail and The Wretched are a pair the sequence needs. The Great Below must close Left and The Way Out Is Through open Right, and Ripe (With Decay) is the compelled end. The test bites on Right: Where Is Everybody?, Please and The Big Come Down restate one mid-tempo song without turning it, and Starfuckers, Inc. is not needed; on Left, No, You Don’t is a lesser song. Perhaps a fifth of the time is permitted, not compelled.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a self that has collapsed tries to hold on to the one thing it has not ruined, and the holding is the only hope it has; and recovery is not a turn but a passage, made by going through the damage, as the title The Way Out Is Through says. The Fragile names the beloved as the frail thing to be protected; We’re in This Together makes of two damaged people a pact against the world. Sound discloses as fully as words: the piano figures that break through the noise, the thinning of La Mer. Held well below the bar: the words are general to the point of interchangeability, and addiction and grief are present as weather, not as stated knowledge.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and on a long record it comes often. The Day the World Went Away rises on a choir of wordless syllables over a held wall of guitar, a grandeur of loss. We’re in This Together climbs to a chorus that is triumph and desperation at once. Just Like You Imagined is the dreadful sublime, a fast piano figure under drums and massed guitar driven to a peak. La Mer is height by withdrawal, and The Great Below rises out of it, slow and drowned. The Way Out Is Through builds by layers to an arrival, perhaps the summit. Held from the top on Right, where Into the Void, Where Is Everybody?, Please and Starfuckers, Inc. have force and groove without height.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth is evoked often and built in one frame: the descent and the return. Left goes down, through a fall, an aftermath, the instrumental march of Pilgrimage and the sea of La Mer, and ends on The Great Below, a title that echoes the opening phrase of the Sumerian descent of Inanna in its usual English rendering; whether the echo is meant cannot be known, and nothing here rests on it. Right opens on The Way Out Is Through, the ascent named and built in sound. That frame bears load across two discs. Held below the bar: Right does not sustain the climb, falling back into songs of grievance, and the end in decay closes the frame as ruin, leaving the archetype half built.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the maker’s own: The Downward Spiral had made industrial rock a mass form, and the expected sequel was another compact assault. The record turns from it toward length, texture and quiet: piano, acoustic guitar, a third of its tracks without song, passages built as soundtrack rather than as rock. The stake was real. A double album of 103 minutes came after five years of silence into a market moving toward nu-metal and teen pop, fell from the charts within weeks and was taken as indulgent. What holds it: the language it moved toward, the ambient instrumental and the double album as a mind’s sprawl, had been made by Eno and Bowie and by Pink Floyd, and the songs on Right return to the inherited manner.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The form carries the knowledge in three ways. The two discs, Left and Right, a descent and a climb, make the record’s one argument structural: the way out is through, and the through takes a whole disc. The alternation of song and instrumental makes the instrumentals the places where the self cannot speak, so that when the voice drops out, in Just Like You Imagined and La Mer, the music says what words have failed to. And figures recur, the piano of The Frail returning under The Wretched, so that the length is woven rather than piled. The sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top: the double length is partly permitted, and several songs on Right could change place or go without altering what the form knows.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence over twenty-seven years of return. Received as indulgent, the record has since been revalued by critics and listeners as its maker’s richest work, which is evidence that it yielded on return what it withheld at first. The yield is chiefly formal: a production of very many layers, guitar treated until it is texture and small sounds set under large ones, rewards close listening again and again, and the instrumental tracks have been issued on their own, a sign that the textures hold attention without the songs. Semantic depth is shallower: the words do not reward a second look, and a return to them finds little not heard the first time. The well is deep in sound and shallow in sense.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is the rock album of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record shows that industrial rock’s apparatus of treated guitar, programmed rhythm and noise can carry long, quiet, near-orchestral passages, and that a record in this idiom can be built as a soundtrack to a mind rather than a set of songs; an enlargement of the idiom, not a reorganisation of rock. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the clearest line runs through its maker, from this instrumental grammar to Ghosts I to IV (2008) and the film scores of Reznor and Atticus Ross from The Social Network (2010) on, a reach delayed and discounted. Beyond the maker the effect is diffuse, with no named school descending from it.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as released, continuously in print and reissued, its sequence intact; nothing is lost. Presence is steady and wide among listeners of its kind and beyond, kept in its maker’s live sets and revalued by critics, but less broad than its predecessor’s, and its first life was a commercial fall. Charged: the treated guitars and programmed drums of the late 1990s mark it, though the instrumental and piano passages, its best, carry little of the era’s surface, and the production has worn better than most of its decade. These balance at the low end of the usual figure for its age, which meets the bar.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the recorded medium is the record’s plainest strength. Trent Reznor and Alan Moulder build a sound of very many layers that stays legible: in The Day the World Went Away the choir, the held guitar and the voice each sit at their own depth; in Just Like You Imagined piano, drums and guitar mass without mud; in La Mer the quiet is as exactly made as the noise elsewhere. Dynamics run under control from near silence to full saturation, and the joins between tracks are made, not left. Held below Low, at 9.0, and near Remain in Light, at 8.7: the songwriting is uneven, several songs on Right rest on riffs and refrains the arrangement dresses more than develops, and the vocal writing is plainly below the making of sound.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One physics governs most of the record: beauty always under pressure from noise, the piano or the acoustic line the fragile thing the treated guitars threaten. Take the two most distant elements, the solo piano and French speech of La Mer and the assault at the close of Somewhat Damaged: both obey it, the same frailty once exposed and once overwhelmed. The range is wide, from near silence to saturation and from ambient instrumental to industrial song, and the law holds across it. It breaks in places. Starfuckers, Inc. is a sneering satire of celebrity, contempt aimed outward in a record otherwise inward, and Into the Void and Where Is Everybody? lean toward a funk and groove that the law tolerates rather than requires.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form: one consciousness in collapse and attempted recovery; a beloved who is the frail thing to be kept; the bond of two in We’re in This Together; addiction and the wish to die, by the title of I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally; grief; and in Starfuckers, Inc. a gesture at the culture of fame. The sound and the two-disc frame hold these together, and the length lets the one consciousness be explored at depth. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the orders are few, with no family beyond the pair, no labour, state or history, nature only as the sea in an image, and the social world present only as a target of contempt.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.6, then The Imperishable at 8.5 and The Sublime at 8.4. A sound of very many layers that stays legible from near silence to saturation, the quiet of La Mer as exactly made as the noise; a record whole after twenty-seven years, in print and revalued, its best passages carrying little of its era’s surface; and heights that come often on the first disc, from the wordless choir of The Day the World Went Away to the layered arrival of The Way Out Is Through.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: one consciousness explored at depth, with a beloved, a pact of two, addiction and grief, but no family beyond the pair, no labour, state or history, and the social world only as a target of contempt. Then The Inevitable at 7.4, where perhaps a fifth of 103 minutes is permitted rather than compelled, most of it on the second disc; Pressure on Tradition at 7.5, a reach that runs clearly only through its maker’s later work; and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, a descent and return built across two discs whose return is left half made.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar exactly, but The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.8, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.5 each fall short of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, in the band of Tier III, a tenth short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as first released on compact disc by Nothing Records and Interscope on 21 September 1999, as Halo 14: two discs, Left and Right, twenty-three tracks in their original order, about 103 minutes; produced by Trent Reznor and Alan Moulder; judged from knowledge of the recording as a whole and in its sequence, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. Later editions, on vinyl and on compact disc, and the instrumental versions issued since are not the object. The Downward Spiral (1994), Ghosts I to IV (2008) and the film scores of Reznor and Atticus Ross are other works, named only as evidence of this record’s turn and of its reach. Songs are cited by title, and no lyric is quoted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the sequence and contents of the vinyl edition, the part of any hand beyond the two producers in shaping the sequence, the players beyond Reznor and the tracks they play on, the singles, the chart positions, the exact running times and the share of the time taken by the instrumentals, are not given.