How to Destroy Angels -How to Destroy Angels

Thu 17th Jun, 2010 in Music Reviews

Trent Reznor’s music has always been deeply personal, so it’s no surprise that his new wife, the delightfully named Mariqueen Maandig, was going to get into bed with him musically as well. Reznor’s new project also features his long-time collaborator, sound engineer Atticus Ross, who sits quietly in the background, where he fiddles with knobs and dials to add that extra layer of uneasy listening to the mix.

How to Destroy Angel’s self-titled EP is a taster, a few bites in the degustation menu that Reznor has proven himself capable of concocting ever since he got off the drugs and booze. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that Reznor and Ross dredged up some of the work that Nine Inch Nails left on the cutting room floor during the Ghosts and The Fragile sessions and layered Maandig’s whispering vocals over the top of it.

Is it possible to be derivative of your own work? Reznor is not known for being one to repeat himself. Still, it’s early days yet. What we may be hearing is likely an experiment rather than a decisive statement on the future of the band.

The clear stand-out here is The Spaces in Between with a slow-burning, grinding sound-scape that leaves you with a feeling of dread. It’s the one track where Maandig’s vocals really add something powerful emotionally to the music. The coolness of her voice adds a new angle to Reznor’s dark edginess, producing a kind of chilling, almost removed effect. Her voice frays and almost snaps at one point, adding a tasty, cinematic tension to the sound. I must admit, too, the disturbing video left quite an imprint upon me. There’s something genuinely creepy about this song, and its matching video, with all of its unsettling stillness and dystopian murder-fetishry.

Also noteworthy is A Drowning where Maandig’s vocals are at her most human and you really feel the emotional desolation when she sings, ‘I’m drowning here… please… anyone. I don’t think I can save myself.’ There’s an elegant desperation here that chills to the bone.

The other songs on this EP blur into the middle distance between these subtly beautiful and disconcerting bookends. The Believers is thick with the kind of atheist fervour that made Reznor such an anti-Christian icon in the 90s. Though not as effortlessly disturbing as Space in Between, this track has a an icy strangeness, augmented by Maandig’s cold, clean vocals. The Reznor-Maandig duet Parasite has something of the signature Reznor dance-and-die groove to it and would likely make a good a club classic in hell, which is no bad thing in Reznor Land.