I remember the exact moment I first heard “Into The Void”, the third track from the second disc of NIN’s magnum opus.  I was lying on the top bunk bed of an Australian youth hostel, thousands of miles from home and hundreds of miles from anywhere else, still smelling of a mixture of beer from the night before and industrial detergent from the cleaning shift I had just finished as part of my work-for-board.  My best mate from home, knowing that I’d be skint and seriously deprived of decent music (this is a country where Angry Anderson is heralded as a rock messiah), had sent me a cassette of what he was listening to at the time, and it just so happened that the two tracks (“Into the Void” and “Somewhat Damaged”) from NIN just blew me away.

Released in 1999, the enigmatic Trent Reznor and arguably the best NIN line-up thus far, “The Fragile” appeared as a vast, epic two-disc tour de force in a music world still dubious of double-albums – for every “The Wall” there are plenty of others that could and should have been edited down to one disc (“Garage Inc” anyone?!).  Always a leader not a follower, Reznor’s use of odd samples, choirs, ethereal chanting, slide guitar and even distorted ukele was not what I was used to listening to.  “The Fragile” continued in the same vein as its predecessor, 1994’s “The Downward Spiral”, with a bleak, harsh view of a broken, disintegrating world, borne of the erratic mindset of Reznor.  His mental state, constant tinkering and perfectionism meant that, five years after their last release, it was a miracle that the album ever saw the light of day at all.

Building and falling constantly throughout its hour-and-a-half plus running time, there really is no filler on “The Fragile” –tracks like the previously mentioned “Into The Void”, “The Wretched” and “We’re In This Together Now” chug along fuelled by Reznor’s self-loathing lyrics, Charlie Clauser and Danny Lohner’s claustrophobic synths and Jerome Dillon’s veracious drumming, before you are literally submerged in the gentle piano of “La Mer” and “The Great Below” and the menacing “The Mark Has Been Made”.

 “The Fragile” showed a grunge-loving (and grungey-smelling) backpacker, miles from home, that it didn’t have to be loud to rock, it wasn’t just dance music that had bleeps and samples and most importantly it let that backpacker know that his mate hadn’t gone all nu-metal while he’d been away.

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Track Listing

Somewhat Damaged
The Day the World Went Away
The Frail
The Wretched
We're in This Together
The Fragile
Just Like You Imagined
Even Deeper
Pilgrimage
No, You Don't
La Mer
The Great Below
The Way Out Is Through
Into the Void
Where Is Everybody?
The Mark Has Been Made
Please
Starfuckers, Inc.
Complication
I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
The Big Come Down
Underneath It All
Ripe (With Decay)