His 1990 anthem, “Head Like a Hole,” from Pretty Hate Machine, came this close to becoming what “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became - the theme song of smart misfits everywhere. What Robert Plant was to the post-blues screech and Kurt Cobain is to Northwest grunge, Reznor is to tortured death-disco howl - existential pain expressed as rock & roll. Sure, bands like Nirvana play the soft-loud game, too, but Nine Inch Nails auteur Trent Reznor takes it to sadistic extremes, especially since the song - without the power riffing and the howl, the distortion and the infinite layering - would essentially be as melodic as a late Beatles tune. Then you turn it down and start the cycle again. But almost as soon as you rush to your pre-amp and squeeze in more juice, the loud comes back in, but so unimaginably loud this time that you think your speaker coils might melt, and old man Reilly in the next apartment has already started to bang his broomstick on the wall. Self-Destruct,” for example, the first song on the CD, the soft passages are soft chiefly in the sense of not being loud, as if there were a really great party down the street that you were wimping out on, pumped guitars and cranking boom-thwack drum machines and whatnot. You have only two options with this album: Play it too softly, or play it too loud. It’s a new frontier in rock & roll: music that pins playback levels far into the red. Nine Inch Nails achieve a new kind of loud on The Downward Spiral: accessible hard-rock moves overlaid with a scrim of electronic racket, white noise, screams, the kind of blown-speaker rattle that seems to use the limitations of crappy stereo equipment the way that Hendrix riffed on the distortion that howled from overdriven Marshall stacks.
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