| Trent Reznor always was a perfectionist, laboring over his final mixes with a fine-tooth comb, a belabored process that inevitably led to long gaps between albums. About five years a piece, actually, a wait that was sustainable between his 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine, and his 1994 breakthrough, The Downward Spiral; a wait, considering the expectations, that was understandable between that record and its 1999 sequel, The Fragile; yet it was a wait that was a little bewildering and frustrating between that record and its long-gestating follow-up, With Teeth. The Fragile was a grandiose, indulgent double album, dense enough to alienate fairweather fans while making advocates of those with enough time, patience, and fanaticism to listen to it repeatedly until it all made sense. It may not have pleased everybody, but it seemed like a record that necessitated half a decade to construct, and arrived with an appropriate sense of drama. That鈥檚 not the case with With Teeth, which appeared in the spring of 2005 with the requisite deluge of press but without the sense of breathless anticipation that greeted The Fragile. Part of that was changing times — fans who were 25 in 1999 were now 30 and weren鈥檛 following pop music as closely — but it鈥檚 also true that the double-disc set whittled his audience down to its core, diminishing Nine Inch Nails鈥 |
