http://www.solutionsbackwardsinitiative.net/pilgrims
http://www.securebroadcastinformatics.com
http://www.bethehammer.net/bio.htm
year zero research: http://www.ninwiki.com/Year_Zero_Research
NEW YORK (Billboard) -- Trent Reznor could have just given a few interviews to explain Nine Inch Nails' new album, "Year Zero." But instead, he's using a multifaceted Internet scavenger hunt, and in some cases, his own rabid fans, to help gradually build the story of the project.
Dystopian, apocalyptic themes are pervasive on the album, due in stores April 17, echoing topics the group has explored since 1989's classic "Pretty Hate Machine."
Neither Reznor, his management nor representatives at his Interscope label would speak to Billboard about the campaign, which has encompassed everything from cryptic phrases on T-shirts to Orwellian Web sites to MP3s found on USB drives in bathrooms at NIN concerts. But a source with knowledge of the project says Reznor may very well perceive it all not as a marketing campaign, but as "a new entertainment form."
Indeed, the source says the campaign forms the body of the "Year Zero" experience: "It is the CD booklet come to life. It precedes the concept album and the tour. And it will continue for the next 18 months, with peaks and valleys."
The source continues, "No one has assembled the full story yet. The new media is creating the story as it goes."
"Year Zero" came to life in early February when Web-savvy fans discovered that highlighted letters inside words on a NIN tour T-shirt spelled out "I am trying to believe." Savvy fans added a ".com" to the five words and, voila, located a thought-provoking, eerie Web site. Other associated sites created by 42 Entertainment were soon discovered, including :
http://www.bethehammer.net/bio.htm,
http://www.anotherversionofthetruth.com and http://www.churchofplano.com, where a dark future reigns supreme.
For instance, errant clicks on sites like anotherversionofthetruth.com result in interception by the Bureau of Morality, which will then e-mail warnings that the user is "A CONSUMER OF DISSIDENT MATERIAL . . . Any further attempts to view, consume, or distribute un-american (sic) content will result in the loss of citizenship increments and/or the imposition of fines, penalties, or imprisonment. You have choices. Make the RIGHT ones."
For further instructions on making good choices, the creepy note instructs the e-mail recipient to visit http://www.thepriceoftreason.net/. And another mind game begins anew, with its own set of rabbit holes.
Within days of discovery of the sites, the blogosphere was rich with anxious NIN fans sharing their experiences on message boards.
According to one post, a male fan, allegedly by happenstance, found a USB drive in a bathroom stall during a NIN concert at the Coliseum in Lisbon, Portugal. This flash drive (yes, Reznor's idea) contained an MP3 of album track "My Violent Heart." Additional USB drives were purportedly found in Barcelona and Manchester, England; they included MP3s of album tracks "Me, I'm Not" and "In This Twilight," respectively.
Excited fans then began swapping and sharing these music files online. Another Web posting alleged that all this activity resulted in entertainment blog Idolator and other sites receiving e-mail from the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA), demanding that they remove the MP3s from their sites. A representative for the RIAA, the lobby group for the major U.S. labels, confirms this seemingly mind-boggling move.
Meanwhile, another tour T-shirt contained a highlighted Cleveland-area phone number that, when dialed, played a snippet of lead single "Survivalism." The song currently ranks at No. 2 on the airplay-based Modern Rock chart.
By late February, a "Year Zero" trailer was made available online. Near the trailer's end, an extended arm, known by fans as "the Presence," appears. The Presence is a recurring theme throughout the campaign and is featured on the album's cover.
Ironically, with its numerous pirated downloads available, the whole album has not leaked yet. According to a source, the only leaks are the ones Reznor approved himself.
With his unveiling of "Year Zero," Reznor may, whether he realizes it or not, be building a new option for presenting music that augments the existing CD/tour scenario.
"It's not about slapping something on top of an existing experience," the source says. "It must be its own entity. Make the experience as immersive as possible for fans."
Nine Inch Nails creates a world from 'Year Zero'
There's a misconception afoot about "Year Zero," the latest project from musical puppet master Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails. Launched in February with a cryptic message on a tour T-shirt, fleshed out in dozens of websites, scary voicemail messages, Morse code blips, murals, fliers and other real-world propaganda, "Year Zero" reaches a peak (but not its conclusion) with today's album release. There's never been such an extensive or well-planned campaign involving a major pop release. But "Year Zero" represents something more than just killer marketing.
Reznor has been complaining that the alternate reality game, or ARG, set in motion before the album's release has been portrayed as separate and subservient to the album. He's right. "Year Zero" isn't just a cyberpunk "Dark Side of the Moon" augmented by a few impressive Web-based extras. Nor is it merely a game, the latest take on Quake with an amazing soundtrack. (Reznor did, incidentally, write the music and effects for that bestselling shooter game.)
"Year Zero" is a total marriage of the pop and gamer aesthetics thatunlocks the rusty cages of the music industry and solves some key problems facing rock music as its cultural dominance dissolves into dust.
It's easy for even Reznor appreciators to overlook this accomplishment, because "Year Zero" also works as pure pop. Composed mostly on a laptop and inspired by the Situationist hip-hop of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad production team, its 16 tracks reinvigorate Reznor's most effective sonic tricks: surface noise, extreme dynamic shifts, dinosaur riffing and the slashes of prettiness that drive light into the hard stuff.
Reznor's been picking at these elements forever, rearranging them, exploring their inner structures, breaking them apart.
He's been criticized for being insular, but think of Reznor as Tolkien, not Timbaland, and the repetitions make sense. He's building a world, and that world needs its own language, and language establishes itself through trial and error.
In his own universe
After the grim, hit-hungry perfectionism of the group's previous album, 2005's "With Teeth," it's great to hear Reznor sprawl out in his own universe again.
But to stop at the music is to miss what "Year Zero" accomplishes as a larger, ongoing work. In fact, it may be a mistake to even start with the music. Hard-core NIN fans and online game enthusiasts have been adding up the ARG's clues to uncover its "X-Files"-like narrative, a compelling vision of a near-future afflicted by multiple calamities.
Grainy and hard to navigate, full of text and images so commonplace they feel real, these interlocking pages (executed by veteran game designers 42 Entertainment) don't tell a story; they lock the participant into an experience that feels both personal and epic. That's exactly what Reznor's music does. Equal parts whisper and arena-sized punch, it immerses listeners into an emotional state that their own responses come to mirror.
The songs on "Year Zero," each from the perspective of a character or characters already existent in the ARG, draw a connection between the music fan's passionate identification with songs and the gamer's experience of becoming someone else online.
Though it's supposedly a leap that Reznor's not writing about his own pain anymore, he still puts his gift for the ultra-personal to good use. The frantic first single, "Survivalism," reveals the inner thoughts of a resistance leader; "Vessel" does the same for a religious fanatic; "The Good Soldier," with its swaggering drum line beat, captures the reluctance of a military man.
Lyrics describing group experiences still circle back to the individual. Even the beautiful, cataclysmic closing suite, with its images of nuclear winter, focuses on a dying lover's tender plea. Melodramatic on their own, Reznor's lyrics gain believability when heard under the encompassing sway of the game.
Reznor has always been tuned into alternate realities, mostly those that occupy and distort the minds of average, uptight social outcasts. He emerged during the 1990s heyday of psychological rock, when fellow angsty boys Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were making generational anthems about sexual confusion, personal drift and the sorrows of the broken home.
A tech nerd with roots in meticulous synth pop instead of punk or metal, Reznor made screamingly intense music about repression and its consequences; his great themes were sadomasochism (literal and metaphorical) and mental disorder.
Personal to political
Whatever personal issues propelled Reznor toward this ugly subject matter, his genius in the studio made his obsessions blossom into art. The Nine Inch Nails sound quickly evolved from plain industrial rock to the satanic equivalent of the Beach Boys — infinitely complex explorations of the way musical structures can mirror the ups and downs of an interior life.
On "Year Zero," he's reaching beyond his usual fascination with personal (or interpersonal) torment to confront group dynamics — specifically, politics. But he's still most skilled at evoking the way the mind works in isolation.
This is where the multitiered experience of "Year Zero" intersects with the worldview it presents to show how pop music can communicate in a new way. The isolated experience of politics is ideology — the personal, even isolated, absorption of a set of beliefs. Embracing an ideology is a lot like playing an alternate reality game. You commit; you move where the rules lead; you risk failure if you doubt the path.
The usual model for political pop is to state ideas or conviction in an anthem or a ballad — to foreground meaning over experience. But hard rock has always been more about body-shaking physical possession than words.
On "Year Zero," Reznor attempts to explore the physical experience of political ideology — how it feels to believe, or to rebel. His soldiers and subversives and faithful idiots speak in bromides, but the music, embedded with dissonance and sudden squalls of beauty, gives each character his own imperfect, powerful voice.
Factor in the listener's experience of "Year Zero" on the Web and in community with other fans, and you have an event that bowls over the boundaries of the usual pop release.
Reznor promises to continue the "Year Zero" project into a new recording, and possibly a feature film. I hope he opts against that second option and sticks with more innovative forms.
Writing on the ARGoriented site unfiction.com, a theorist whose pseudonym is "Spacebass" coined the term "chaotic fiction" to describe the particular art of alternative reality gaming; such a phrase also fits music that strives to create a universe while staying open-ended enough for fans to find themselves within it.
At the very least, Trent Reznor is still creating chaotic rock 'n' roll. And that's more than marketing; it's pioneering art.
http://www.echoingthesound.org/phpbbx/viewtopic.php?t=20265
Weird Web Trail: Conspiracy Theory — Or Marketing For Nine Inch Nails LP?
Series of alternate-reality sites linked to 'concept record' Year Zero, due April 17.
A dystopian civilization in the throes of extinction. A government poisoning its own citizens through the drinking water. Military police raiding private residences. The end of civil liberties. The creation of a Church-State. Mind control.
The contents of some conspiracy theorist's personal manifesto? The plot of a rote first-person shooter? The results of a quick jaunt through Snopes.com? Actually, it's all part of the elaborate (and somewhat terrifying) concept behind Nine Inch Nails' upcoming Year Zero album (due April 17), details of which are currently being disseminated through a series of increasingly spooky — and downright odd — Web sites.
Strangely enough, the story actually began on the back of a T-shirt sold on NIN's current European tour. Dates and cities are listed, with certain letters highlighted. When those letters were arranged, they spelled out the phrase "I am trying to believe," which most saw as just another statement of shattered hope from NIN mastermind Trent Reznor ... that was, until one particularly, uh, "enterprising" individual decided to Google the phrase.
What was revealed was a rather unsettling site (IAmTryingToBelieve.com) dedicated to information on "Parepin," a drug allegedly added to the water supply by the federal government at some unknown date to protect citizens from bioterror attacks. While all appears to be normal, the author of the site — who is not identified — paints a different picture, referring to Parepin as "bioterrorism" being waged on U.S. citizens without their knowledge, designed to placate them.
But in some cases, the opposite occurs. Dosage is not controlled and, according to the site, the more water that unknowing citizens drink, the harsher the side effects.
"Parepin affects brain chemistry — specifically dopamines. Dopaminergic overactivity is linked to schizophrenia. Parepin dosage is not controlled. It's just in the water. The more water you drink, the more Parepin you ingest," the author states. "Parepin may make some people more susceptible to visions and hypnagogic hallucinations (those very vivid dreams you have when you think you are awake.)"
The site also makes mention of citizens witnessing something called "The Presence," which is shown in a series of blurry photographs as what appears to be a giant hand descending from the heavens.
"I used to dismiss conspiracy theories about the Administration's 'real reason' for adding Parepin to our water," the author writes. "Now, I'm not so sure."
Hidden on the site is an e-mail address to contact the author, yet all correspondence to the address is answered with the following auto response, which indicates that he or she has changed (or, possibly, was forced to change) their opinion:
"Thank you for your interest. It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent developed to protect us from bio-terrorism. The Administration is acting purely in the best interests of its citizens; to suggest otherwise was irresponsible and I deeply regret it. I'm drinking the water. So should you."
And things only grow more confusing — and unnerving — from there. Members on a NIN fan site, EchoingtheSound.org, soon began to uncover even more sites, all seemingly unrelated upon first glance. But through careful — and some may say obsessive — examination they all began to tie together, creating a rather Orwellian picture of the United States circa the year 2022.
AnotherVersionOfTheTruth.com is, on the surface, a site created by "the U.S. Bureau of Morality," featuring a fluttering flag superimposed over a rippling cornfield and emblazoned with the motto "Zero Tolerance. Zero Fear." But if users click and drag their mouse across the image, what is revealed is a black-and-white photo of a bombed-out wasteland. Visitors are then taken to a secret "messageboard" with topics like "End of the World?" and "Cops Murder Muslim Kid."
On the board, members — or perhaps government agents — discuss Parepin and the Presence (sample entry: "Was it an angel? Devil? Alien? God? I don't know. It was a Presence,") the rise of a new drug called Opal — which, we're told, was created by the U.S. Government after global warming destroyed coca leaves in South America — and a secret-police raid on a Muslim home in Saginaw, Michigan.
Several audio samples are also available on the site, including one taken from the cell phone of a girl in the Michigan home, and an "angry sniper" who opens fire (what he calls an act of "violent resistance") during a baseball game.
The messageboard also contains a link to BeTheHammer.org, the site belonging the "angry sniper," and makes mention of "Consolidated Mail Systems," both of which are important clues to advancing the story.
On BeTheHammer, the sniper says he worked for the secret police, raiding homes of Muslim-Americans, torturing and in some cases murdering them. He also makes mention of time spent in the 105th Airborne Crusaders.
And, of course, a quick Google search of "105th Airborne Crusaders" turns up a site dedicated to a special-forces group formed "as part of our nation's swift answer to the atrocities in Los Angeles," and made up of "men and women who kept a personal relationship with our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ and allowed the Holy Ghost to guide their rifles true." According to posts from former members of the 105th, the Crusaders launched campaigns in Iran (even mentioning the detonation of a nuclear device in Tehran), Yemen, Chad, Turkey, Syria and the Kashmir Region.
There are also mentions on that site of a New Evangelical Church, which donated land to the 105th. Somehow — and we're not entirely sure how — this led NIN fans to the discovery of another site, ChurchOfPlano.com, run by a fictitious New Evangelical outfit that practices "Neighborhood Cleansing" and holds sermons about the Presence.
And finally, as if all of that wasn't mind-bending enough, a Google search of Consolidated Mail Systems turns up a purported e-mail in-box owned by someone with the handle "NoOneImportant," which contains a police-manual definition of Opal that suggests it causes users to suffer the same hallucinations as those who ingest too much Parepin.
Are we to believe, then, that in the future the government has really been drugging its citizens? Will we engage in a Holy War with Muslim nations? Will secret police groups creep in the shadows at night? We're led to believe that the answer to all of these questions is "Yes."
And it all brings up a couple of new questions: Just who is behind all these Web-related shenanigans in the first place? And what do they have to do with Nine Inch Nails?
Well, in relation to the former: all of the sites are registered through Domains by Proxy, an Arizona-based company that protects the identities of site owners (when reached for comment, a spokesperson for DBP would not reveal exactly who registered any of the sites as it would "violate the terms of service provided by the company.") But according to reports published on the Web site of the U.K.'s Digit magazine and elsewhere, the sites are part of an alternate reality game, created by 42 Entertainment, a marketing company responsible for one of the most famously ambitious ARGs in history: "I Love Bees," an effort that combined Web sites, banks of public telephones and vials of honey sent through the mail to create, well, "buzz" for the fall 2004 release of "Halo 2" (see " Want To Live Like Neo? Alternate Reality Games Might Be Your White Rabbit").
When contacted by MTV News, a spokesperson for 42 had no comment on the company's involvement with NIN.
And about the latter: When the band's label, Interscope Records, was contacted they too had no comment, though they did release a statement by Reznor which seemed to put the whole project — and the concept behind Year Zero — into focus.
"This record began as an experiment with noise on a laptop in a bus on tour somewhere. That sound led to a daydream about the end of the world. That daydream stuck with me and over time revealed itself to be much more," Reznor said in the statement. "I believe sometimes you have a choice in what inspiration you choose to follow and other times you really don't. This record is the latter. Once I tuned into it, everything fell into place ... as if it were meant to be. ... The record turned out to be more than a just a record in scale, as you will see over time.
"Part one is Year Zero. Concept record. Sixteen tracks. What's it about? Well, it takes place about 15 years in the future. Things are not good. If you imagine a world where greed and power continue to run their likely course, you'll have an idea of the backdrop," he continued. "The world has reached the breaking point — politically, spiritually and ecologically. Written from various perspectives of people in this world, Year Zero examines various viewpoints set against an impending moment of truth."
Nine Inch Nails' Year Almost Here, But Real-World Game Continues
Some 60 fans gather in L.A. to collect 'resistance kits' — part of band's mysterious marketing scheme.
LOS ANGELES — On a sun-streaked Friday evening, on the corner of Melrose Avenue and Ogden Street, underneath a mural featuring a bleary-eyed Uncle Sam and a giant pig with the Washington monument and a revolver strapped to its back, roughly 60 black-clad people milled about on the sidewalk. It was a bizarre assembly of people who don't assemble for much — made even more bizarre by the fact that no one was really sure why they'd gathered there in the first place.
Here's what everyone did know: Last week, followers of the ever-expanding Alternate Reality Game surrounding Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero album received an e-mail from OpenSourceResistance.net, one of many Web sites established by Trent Reznor and company to help spread the story behind Zero (see "Weird Web Trail: Conspiracy Theory — Or Marketing For Nine Inch Nails LP?").
In the message, the organizer of OSR (a man named Neil Czerno, who claims to be a clandestine revolutionary battling the oppressive government that dominates the album's story line) advised members of a meeting taking place in Los Angeles on Friday. In typical YZ fashion, little else was divulged.
"If you're interested, show up near Melrose and Ogden at or a little after 7 p.m. on Friday evening. Wear something that shows you're one of us," the e-mail read. "Stand under the big pig and follow the revolver across the street to the marked van. Knock twice. When you've got the stuff, get out of there fast. Don't attract attention. Don't be followed."
And so on Friday evening, they showed up, wearing black NIN T-shirts and homemade resistance arm bands. There were even some families, moms and dads with kids in strollers ... all a little bit anxious, all waiting beneath the same mural, all waiting to see what would happen when the online ARG took the leap into the real world.
(Check out pictures of the dedicated NIN fans, and get a peek at what they waited to collect.)
"Me and my friends were making jokes that we might get abducted and taken to some undisclosed location in the desert, or something like that. And we would have been OK with that," joked fan David Norstad, decked out in a black leather jacket with NIN stencils on the sleeves. "We just got an e-mail to show up by the mural and wait for the van, and I love this Tom Clancy kind of crap. I've never seen a more brilliant back story to an album. It goes to show that you can get your word out about the art without being too commercial about it, flashing too many billboards."
A few minutes after 7, a gun-metal gray van pulled up to the Smart & Final warehouse store across the street, threw it into park and waited. The throngs of fans dashed through the late-evening traffic on Melrose and queued up behind the vehicle. Soon, the back door of the van swung open, and out popped several muscle-y dudes, who quickly surveyed the situation and started handing out black metal cases, each stenciled with OSR's flag logo.
Inside the cases — or "resistance kits," as they were being dubbed — were 10 OSR fliers, 10 buttons, four stickers and one stencil, plus a host of materials (hat, bandanna and patch) emblazoned with the resistance logo, a sort of guerilla street team in a box.
But that wasn't all. One of the event organizers, who wouldn't reveal his name, told MTV News that three of the cases also contained cell phones, which the folks behind OSR would be calling "at an undisclosed time" with instructions for a future gathering.
Nine Inch Nails' label, Interscope Records, had no comment on the gathering, or what was next for the Year Zero ARG. And though it's not known if the OSR gathering will be replicated in other cities, attendees in Los Angeles hope that the movement — and the message — behind the album reaches their resistance brethren across the world.
"If there's some art-resistance movement happening in L.A., I'm down for it. I think it's about taking art and making a political statement with it. Because there's not a lot of that going on these days," NIN fan Natalie Potell said. "So maybe it's making people open their eyes a bit. It's an album, but it's more than an album. It's got its own little movement behind it."
Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero Preview: Beginning To Solve The Mystery
A track-by-track tour through the album, due April 17.
For weeks, we've been feverishly following the ever-twisting web of promotion surrounding Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero.
From a simple message encoded on the back of a T-shirt, that web — or, more specifically, an Alternate Reality Game — has grown to encompass eerie voice mail, Web sites, Morse code clues hidden in MP3s and messages buried deep within music videos, all building an impressive (and generally terrifying) back story of a future society poised on the brink of spiritual, moral, political and environmental Armageddon.
And we're not the only ones hooked by it all. The buzz surrounding Zero is seemingly growing daily, with every blog write-up and each clue revealed (see "Weird Web Trail: Conspiracy Theory — Or Marketing For Nine Inch Nails LP?"). And while a certain amount of that interest can no doubt be attributed to the unbelievable thoroughness of the Year Zero ARG, even more of it is due to the harrowing believability of the concept Reznor's cooked up for the album.
It's not a stretch to say that the pressure is squarely on Reznor to deliver. After all, you'd be hard-pressed to think of another musician who's released an album backed by this much self-imposed, carefully crafted hype. With each week that passes, the stakes grow a little bit higher, the chances of Reznor falling flat on his face a little greater. How could Zero — which is due April 17 — be expected to support such an epic and far-reaching story line, one spanning 15 years and three continents, involving a cast of hundreds? How could it possibly live up to the brilliantly labyrinthine promotional scheme from whence it came?
You get the feeling Reznor sort of wanted it that way. It's probably the most adventurous, experimental and ballsy album released on a major label since Green Day's revelatory American Idiot, which also happens to be its closest kin, in spirit at least. Because for all its growling electronics, squelching guitars and plinking African kalimbas, Year Zero is essentially a punk-rock album, one born of the same bold attitude that drove Green Day to jettison traditional thinking while making Idiot.
But that's about as far as those comparisons can go. Because there's no jaunty, nine-minute rock-opera pieces to be found on Zero, nary a ballad on par with "Wake Me Up When September Ends." Shoot, there are barely any discernable guitars. Instead, almost every sound you hear on the album has been chopped, ripped, pulled, flayed, destroyed, flattened, squeezed or smashed beneath the massive, ominous bit-mapping of Reznor and co-producer Atticus Ross. Sixty-four minutes of disorienting, pummeling Sturm und Drang roiling atop a rumbling, certifiably bone-chilling layer of white noise that recalls the wind whipping through a war zone.
Album-opener "Hyperpower!" is all piston-like drums and bit-crushed power chords, a doom-laden instrumental that builds and builds to a snarling frenzy before falling away into silence. "The Beginning of the End" follows that with a fog of spooky synths and Reznor's order of "On your knees," all hidden behind a wall of feedback and guttural, demonic growls.
The first single, "Survivalism," is next, a certified stomper powered by a startling loud/soft dynamic and a menagerie of electronic baubles (fans of modern-rock radio are already well acquainted with this one). "The Good Soldier" snakes along atop a meaty bass line and squawking guitars, recalling NIN's "Closer." The verses are filled with Reznor moaning/singing couplets like, "Blood hardens in the sand/ Cold metal in my hand." The chorus makes mention of "I am trying to believe" (the first Web site revealed in the Year Zero ARG), and the whole thing dissolves into a bizarrely lounge-y composition featuring vibraphones and synths.
"Vessel" is a dissonant, dead-ringer for a Shocklee Bros. track, featuring blaring, siren-like synths and thudding drums. The chorus seems to make reference to the drug Opal (another cog in the Year Zero ARG) as Reznor's voice rasps, "My God/ Can it go any faster?/ Oh my God/ I don't think I can last here," and the song features another lengthy, somewhat dancey outro.
"Me, I'm Not" is a down-tempo excursion through howling, barely discernable guitar wails and electronic bleep-bloop that bubbles up like air escaping from an undersea vent. "Capital G" takes swings at American pig-headedness ("Don't give a sh-- about the temperature in Guatemala/ Don't really see what all the fuss is about") and a holier-than-thou commander in chief who just might be George W. Bush ("Traded in my God for this one/ And he signs his name with a capital G"). And "The Warning" tells the tale of a visitation from the Presence, who delivers a warning about mankind's selfish destruction of the environment (one of the earliest discovered sites in the ARG makes mention of a police manual that describes Opal users feeling as though they had been visited by a Presence, where they "feel the rape of Gaia").
"God Given" kicks off with a tribal, electronic spook show, then steadily quickens to a rush of guitars and a huge build that disappears as quickly as it came, leaving a glaring moment of silence and a sharply whispered, machine-gun missive from Reznor. "Meet Your Master" is a raucous, unsettling exercise in crunching chords, backed by animalistic howls and bellows and a supercharged chorus, all of which stop on a dime for a spindly, electro solo that builds again before slipping away into "The Greater Good," the album's most disparate track.
Starting off with Reznor imploring us to "Breathe" in barely there pants, the track slithers around on a sinewy bed of electronic noise and synthetic whispers, bringing to mind a windswept desert-scape. Through the subtle noise, a twinkling kalimba builds and builds, until being swallowed by a scraped and scratched ball of noise, which in turn is quickly eclipsed by a gently plucked guitar line. Then it's all submerged in inky blackness, while a looped vocal repeats the mantra "Slowly ... breathe ... a sin."
That's followed by "The Great Destroyer," which features drums that stomp like a mythical behemoth and Reznor singing, "Oh, they cannot see/ I am the Great Destroyer," in a lilting upper register. It crashes about until the second chorus, when Reznor's vocals are suddenly lifted through the stratosphere, and the whole song collapses into a grinding, shockingly placed drill-'n'-bass section that would make Richard D. James (a.k.a. the Aphex Twin) crack an evil smile.
And then we enter the homestretch. "Another Version of the Truth" follows all that clanging with an equally deafening mass of sonic fuzz and the sound of a piano being played in the other room. Perhaps in the haze, there's the buzz of a fly or the drone of a dial tone. The somber piano line is slowly brought to the forefront, as the instrumental track slows to a beautiful maudlin halt. It all falls away, save a single held note, then another wash of white noise and we're on to "In This Twilight," a grandfather-clock creaker spotted with respirator breaths. Reznor sings about what appears to be the detonation of a nuclear device ("And the sky is filled with light/ Can you see it?/ All the black is really white/ If you believe it").
And finally, we stumble into "Zero Sum," all wobbly, fuzzed-out bass and breathy whispers, sounding much like wind trying to move through ash-filled atmosphere. It all gradually rises, the clanging increases, and a multi-voiced army chants, "God have mercy on us." Then there's the slow washout, more somber piano and finally, the slow, low drone of hornets or the whispering wind. And then, nothing.
And in the end, we're left with a whole new series of questions. Has Reznor detonated the world, or are we to believe — as the title implies — that this is the beginning of something new? Has mankind ignored the warnings for too long, or is there still a faint glimmer of hope in the ashes? And, wildly switching gears, will Year Zero have the same effect on Reznor that Idiot did on Green Day? Will it lead a new generation of fans to rediscover his gloriously dissonant body of work?
As with all great art, there are more questions than answers.