Album review: How to Destroy Angels, 'How to Destroy Angels'
2.5 stars (out of 4)
After putting his two-decade-old Nine Inch Nails on the back-burner last year, Trent Reznor said he needed a fresh start musically. Then he formed a new band – How to Destroy Angels -- with his wife, vocalist Mariqueen Maandig, and longtime NIN collaborator Atticus Ross.
Their six-song EP, "How to Destroy Angels" (Null Corporation), available as a free download at howtodestroyangels.com and for sale as a CD, is hardly a jarring departure from business as usual. The distorted guitars and machine beats of “Parasite,” the synthetic swing of “BBB,” the percolating clatter of “The Believers,” the way “The Space in Between” moves in like a black doom-comes-knocking fog – these could’ve all been easily repackaged as Nine Inch Nails songs and no one would’ve known the difference. Maandig’s voice is nestled inside the mix rather than rising above it – she’s more like another instrument, a ghostly texture in Reznor’s arsenal rather than a more traditional-sounding lead vocalist.
It adds up to more of a transitional work than a reinvention, a placeholder until Reznor’s next major move.
greg@gregkot.com