Nine - With Teeth CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

the Nine Inch Nails formula into nasty shape.

Once prolific, Reznor now labors over each album as if it were a five-year plan, finessing the sonic kinks for four years, eleven months, thirty days and twenty-two hours. Plus a couple of hours for lyrics, which he apparently composes by skimming the poems his fans leave on message boards. ("Oooh, 'Sometimes I forget I'm alive'? I can use that one!") On Teeth, he abandons the quiet piano diddles of The Fragile for pure aggro. The first half is basically Reznor saying, "You want a hit single? I'll give you a hit single," with simplistic, radio-ready sludge a la "The Hand That Feeds." But the second half has Nine Inch Nails' richest, heaviest music since Downward Spiral, with the "Billie Jean" drums of "Only," the monolithic synth crunch of "Beside You in Time," the Pixies-meet-Pere Ubu clang of "Getting Smaller." It all builds to the one big "Hurt"-style piano ballad on the album, "Right Where It Belongs," so mournful that Johnny Cash must be singing it in heaven. It's vintage Nine Inch Nails: New Wave with a heart of darkness.

Industrial superstar Trent Reznor is back with an album that's as dark as his best stuff but tempered a bit in the sexy torture department. In addition to taking on more substantial subject matter than in the past, Reznor applies stronger elements of heavy guitar rock to several songs.