Halo 8: The Downward Spiral

I blame the video for “Closer”. Before that, I’d heard the name Nine Inch Nails, but hadn’t given it a second thought. Just another band. They’re not Prince, or Bowie, so how good could they possibly be? But, man, that video . . .

Problem was, no matter how many times I saw it--and it wasn’t often, God forbid MTV play music videos--I couldn’t hear the song very well. I heard the beat, that pneumatic heartbeat sound, and I heard the chorus (“I wanna fk you like an animal”) but it was only bits and pieces of the song . . . couldn’t make out anything substantial. So one day I found myself with a little extra cash and I decided to buy two new Cds. I grabbed Hendrix’s THE ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE, and Nine Inch Nails’s THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL.

From that moment on, THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL was just about all I listened to. For a LONG time.

Where had this music been all my life? These lyrics, I’d never heard anything like them outside of horror fiction but they were awesome. So full of anger and spite, that’s my kinda song. I checked the liner notes and saw that Trent Reznor IS Nine Inch Nails. You mean one guy is doing all this? Holy sht!

Released in March of 1994, Halo 8: The Downward Spiral is Trent Reznor’s magnum opus. Prince had SIGN “O” THE TIMES, Bowie had ZIGGY STARDUST. Halo 8 is Reznor’s legacy.

THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL is a concept album, which follows its main, unnamed character, as his life proceeds on, as the title suggests, a downward spiral through self-destruction, depression, anger, misery, and finally, death.

”I take you where you want to go
I give you all you need to know
I drag you down I use you up
Mr. Self-destruct”

While Reznor claims he wanted to make an album that was a departure from the previous EP, BROKEN, in my opinion THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL is simply the next evolutionary step up from Halo 5. Thematically similar, the songs now show a very obvious maturation in terms of style, originality and variety. No longer satisfied to simply play as loud and fast as possible, the songs on Halo 8 vary between slow and burning (“Piggy”), haunting (“Hurt”) to seductive (“Reptile”) and melancholy (“A Warm Place”). But he hasn’t forgotten to bring the noise. “Heresy”, “March of the Pigs”, “Big Man with a Gun”, any of these songs have the strength and ferocity to come in, slap you about the face until you’re bruised, and get out before you know what happened.

Lyrically, also, the songwriting has grown in leaps and bounds. There are things in these songs on which entire theses could be written.

”He sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see
He tries to tell me what I put inside of me
He's got the answers to ease my curiosity
He dreamed a god up and called it Christianity
Your god is dead and no one cares
If there is a hell I'll see you there”

Obvious Nietzschean influences, as well as cultural: THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL is also famous for having been recorded at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, the famous Tate house, renamed “Le Pig” after the infamous blood-scrawled message left at the scene. That influence is also felt on THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL in songs like “Piggy” and “March of the Pigs” in which, in this case, pigs refers to the media

The imagery present in the lyrics has always been a huge point for me. I love songs that are able to express things or bring to mind thoughts you don’t get in a million other songs from a million other anonymous bands, and Reznor has always been good at phrasing things just so:

(from “Ruiner”):
“what you gave to me
my perfect ring of scars
you know I can see what you really are”

(from “The Becoming”):
“I beat my machine it's a part of me it's inside of me
I'm stuck in this dream it's changing me I am becoming
the me that you know he had some second thoughts
he's covered with scabs and he is broken and sore”

(from “I Do Not Want This”):
“I'm always falling down the same hill
bamboo puncturing this skin
and nothing comes bleeding out of me just like a waterfall I'm drowning in
2 feet below the surface I can still make out your wavy face
and if I could just reach you maybe I could leave this place”

And then there’s the music. According to Reznor, everything for Halo 8 was recorded directly onto a computer, arranged, and then transferred to tape, which allowed for a myriad of different parts of extended improvised playing to be chopped up and pieced together. Along with sound clips from movies and sampled loops, the songs on Halo 8 each contain so many layers, it’ll be years before you’ve heard everything. I’ve owned this CD for over a decade and I’m still finding things I never noticed before. This is the genius and craftsmanship of Trent Reznor.

Unlike Halo 5, which was just short enough to be perfect, Halo 8 contains 14 songs and, unfortunately that leaves some songs open to be mere filler. “Ruiner” and “I Do Not Want This” are both just similar enough that their placement on the album, with only 1 song between them, makes them both seen redundant. Likewise, the instrumental intro to “Eraser” is just good enough lyrics are unnecessary, especially when they consist of nothing more than a list.

“Need you
Dream you
Find you
Taste you”, etc.

And the funny thing is, these imperfections only seem to add to the album. It’s about self-loathing and depression and those dark black places we find ourselves in from time to time. Those places aren’t pretty, but they are necessary, just as the chaos at the end of “I Do Not Want This” is necessary because the discordant mess of static and vocal effects don’t just imply the state of mind the song spotlights, it evokes it. And that’s another thing I’ve always loved about THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL. It doesn’t just talk about those moods and states of mind, the music is arranged in just such a way as to trick the brain into thinking “That’s so ugly it’s beautiful.” And that can’t be easy to pull off.

Trent Reznor and Halo 8 came about during a time in my life when I was tired of the same old same old in everything. Movies were boring, music was monotonous, books told the same old stories. Halo 8 opened my eyes and my mind to the realization that I didn’t have to settle for those cliches, that there really are people out there interested in creating something brand new. Halo 8 renewed my interest in many things and it’s still doing it all these years later. It’s a frantic, machine-driven punch to the nervous system, bleeding inspiration and wonder from every note.




Halos what have come before:
Halo 2
Halo 4
Halo 5
Halo 6
Halo 7