LogFAQs > #957977463

Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine results

The participants sorted by deviation from final results:
Jesse_Custer (14)
CasanovaZelos (14)
Johnbobb (14)
ChichiriMuyo (14)
VeryInsane (16)
SpikeSetsFire (16)
neonreaper (18)
HBJDubs (18)
Snake5555555555 (20)
Steiner (20)
MartinFF7 (20)
Raetsel_Lapin (28)
Seanchan (30)
MetalmindStats (30)

Seanchan: Finally did a first listen. I've heard quite a few of their songs on the radio over the years but never actually listened to an album before. (That's got to be at least the dozenth time I've said that...)

Anyway, this is a very interesting album. That industrial sound is certainly something. Definitely some electronic influences on some tracks and a lot of repeated vocals. And some very provocative lyrics at points that caught even MY attention!

I didn't realize that NiN goes all the way back to the late 80s! They've always struck me as such a quintessential 90s band, though I suppose the height of their success is from the 90s, so...

I know NiN was big back when I was in middle/high school but I wasn't really into a lot of music back then. As I was listening, I was trying to decide if I would have liked this back in those days. I think I finally came around to "probably not", if only because I had a lot of bad music takes back then.

VeryInsane: The raw synthetics on this album are so good, I kinda wish Trent made a album similar to this again

MartinFF7: Listened to PHM more in the past week than I had in history up to this point. I put most NIN albums ahead of it, but there's still lots of quality in there... even if you can feel that "80s" sound bleeding in at times.

Also very tough because there's a clear top 4 for me, and a clear 10th place, but 5 through 9 are all pretty good. And sorting the top 4 also became pretty tough.

neonreaper: I feel like all of the songs on this album were my favorite at one point or another. The album is full of so many catchy bits and pieces, as well as production effects that stuck with me. Great album. This album was totally perfect for the teenage years.

Jesse_Custer: The Fragile is the album that got me into NIN and will probably always be my favorite NIN album, but Pretty Hate Machine is also great. And an album as long as The Fragile probably wouldnt have worked well for this topic anyway.

Snake5555555555: Fun fact: this is the only NIN album I own. And I don't even like it that much. Everything here seems pretty dated, even if I can see some seeds of NIN's vastly superior future work. It was very kind of the Jingle Cats to lend their voices to "The Only Time", one of the most grating songs of the 80s industrial dance scene by a mile. Reznor's lyrics try to be cerebral and intelligent like an LCD Soundsystem but end up coming across as corny, edgelord nonsense ("While the devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car", that was a particularly hilarious highlight for me). The beats and production are repetitive, which I know is somewhat of the point, but when combined with the lyrics I was looking at the time waiting for this album to be over. It's not all bad though; Sanctified and Head Like a Hole both hit like any other hard rockers of the 80s, and the latter especially is where the repetitiveness works extremely well in the song's favor. It drives in the message and gives you something to remember it by when it's over. Something I Can Never Have is a decent enough slow-jam, that feels like a prototype for Hurt. Overall, I think NIN are a fantastic band, but this album is forgettable to me and I don't even enjoy it in short bursts to be perfectly honest.

CasanovaZelos: Nine Inch Nails' sound may have evolved from here, but there is something about the raw, dark synthesizers that really click with me, certainly more than any of NIN's albums after The Downward Spiral. Pretty Hate Machine feels like the most twisted take on synthpop and absolutely deserves to be considered a classic - perhaps not on the same level as Downward Spiral, but it stands as a distinct entity, and I would have loved to see Reznor do another album in this style.

Raetsel_Lapin: I'm having a hard time working out how I feel about this album. On the one hand, a few of the tracks--mainly Sin--go a bit too hard on the industrial sound and are rather unpleasant to listen to. The lyrics also tend to be ludicrously repetitive: Head Like A Hole manages to have a dreadful pre-chorus, chorus, and post-chorus that all repeat themselves infinitely to the point of torture and it's not even the most egregious example on the album.

On the other hand, I do find a lot of things to love here. The lyrics are exactly the type of thing I'm into these days, Trent Reznor's vocals really work for me, and I rather dig the band's sound on some of these tracks. When they dial things back a bit, it's quite fantastic and very much my type of thing.

So... it's complicated, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives enough that I'll say I liked the album. I'd be quite interested in trying more NIN music in the future; it feels like they probably have several songs I'd love, if I spent enough time going through their catalogue to find them.

Seanchan: (responding to Raetsel_Lapin) I agree with this. This seems like a band I should explore more of.

HARD disagree about Sin though, that's my #1 song with a bullet here. Love the soundscape on that song.

In terms of the vocals, usually I enjoyed them. Then there's songs like Sanctified where there's just something about how he says some words that just drove me nuts.

It continues to baffle me how much my feelings on the albums we rank changes based upon how/where I'm listening (car vs over ear cans vs bluetooth earbuds) and having to do an actual ranking. Of course it makes sense, but still...

I listened to Pretty Hate Machine in the car this afternoon and was like "yeah, this is pretty good". Then I did a relisten just now at my computer to finalize the ranking and it's like "eh, meh, whatever".

MetalmindStats: Kinda I like this album, surprisingly enough. However, while my opinions on most of the individual songs are substantially positive, the entire effort nonetheless adds up to something significantly lesser than the sum of its parts for me. I struggled to locate why exactly until I read some of the previous posts in this topic, in particular this one:
ChainLTTP posted...
"Head like a hole / black as your soul is pretty much the quintessential angsty teenage male lyric"
Extend this to the entire album and it quite largely puts my thoughts into words: this is pretty much the quintessential angsty teenage male take on synthpop. That musical tradition is one I'm quite fond of, but here it's handled in a way representative of all that I seek to distance myself from, or to put it still more dramatically, my antithesis. In sum, I suppose I enjoy Pretty Hate Machine quite a bit for what it is, just as long as I never have to listen to it again (after my third time this past week).

ChichiriMuyo: One of my all time favorite albums. There just isn't a bad track on this album at all. While some may say it's unrefined or even dated, you can hear everything that would go on the make NIN the band it became here. It's dark, moody, sometimes even filled with hollow anger, but it captures these feelings in a way that at times feels more mature than just "teen angst." I think we all grow past the sentiment expressed in "That's What I Get," but I'm not sure anyone every trully conquers that nagging feeling of "Something I Can Never Have."

---

My top 100 games (with write-ups): https://foolfantastic.com/top-100-video-games-project/
Top 250 songs: https://foolfantastic.com/3290-2/