Music
Nine Inch Nails
With Teeth (Interscope)
Playing Oct. 31 at Gaylord Entertainment Center
Gary Allan
Tough All Over (MCA Nashville)
For Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor, Johnny Cash’s transformative 2002 cover of his ballad “Hurt” must have been a mixed blessing. Cash’s Olympian rumble made the original, from the 1994 NIN touchstone The Downward Spiral, seem a tad puny; the great man had taken Reznor’s anthem of narcissistic self-pity and turned it into his own epitaph. As surely as Aretha once made Otis’ “Respect” her own, “Hurt” (as Reznor readily admitted) now belonged to Cash.
On the other hand, Cash’s “Hurt” was a definitive and very public endorsement from one of popular music’s most towering figures, as well as evidence that Reznor’s songs could survive when removed from their original context as noisy angst machines custom-built to help disaffected teenagers get out their frustrations within the safe confines of their headphones.
Perhaps that’s one reason that With Teeth, the first Nine Inch Nails album in six years, surges with renewed confidence and focus. Reznor trims away the self-indulgent grandeur of 1999’s double-CD The Fragile and returns to an approach closer to the tight new wave clatter of NIN’s 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine—albeit one that cannily absorbs the influence of modern dance-rock acts like LCD Soundsystem. Just as NIN appeared doomed to become a ’90s relic, its industrial clank left to rust, Reznor has smartly updated his trademark sound without alienating the once-upon-a-time Goth teens who formed NIN’s initial audience, now in their mid-30s and nostalgic for their dysthymic youth. (The difference, perhaps, is that now those fist-pumping kids really have things worth being upset about: and not just house payments, divorce and impending baldness, but a world spinning precariously out of control.)
Yet on first blush (upon the release of With Teeth last May), it appeared that Reznor’s lyrics were another story entirely. Like every previous Nine Inch Nails album, the first words that leap out at you immediately from With Teeth are the strings of plainspoken, f-word-studded invective protesting the injustice visited upon Reznor (“I”) by an unspecified tormentor (“you”). Machine’s “You’re gonna get what you deserve” or Spiral’s “Don’t you tell me how I feel” becomes With Teeth’s “There is no fucking you, there is only me.” How on earth can a 40-year-old man still rant in the manner of a teenager who hasn’t been allowed to borrow the car? But repeated listens reveal a warmer tone bordering on wary optimism, perhaps a function of Reznor’s acknowledged cleanup after a period of alcohol and drug abuse. “I think I’m losing my grip, but I can still make a fist,” he sings in “Getting Smaller,” even if the next line is still, “You know I still got my one good arm that I can beat myself up with.” This slightly lighter touch is reflected by the organic addition of drummer Dave Grohl to the mix, two ’90s holdovers pushing one another into the present.
Just as Reznor has allowed a crack of sunlight to creep into NIN’s sky, the previously partly-cloudy worldview of California country singer Gary Allan has turned stormy. Allan’s 2004 hit “Songs About Rain” wryly observed that Nashville produces “all kinds of songs about babies and love that goes right.” But you won’t find any songs like that on Allan’s new Tough All Over, possibly the most melancholy, and blisteringly truthful, mainstream country album in memory.
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Allan comes by his bleak outlook honestly, and horrifically: his wife committed suicide a year ago this week. Despite the fact that he had a hand in writing only four of the album’s songs, Tough All Over is a jarringly intimate public exorcism of Allan’s trauma, especially when heard amid all those songs about babies and endless perfect love on country radio.
Nothing on Tough All Over directly addresses the facts of Allan’s tragedy, but the album is soaked in heartbreak and loss from end to end. Practically every song features a loved one who has been torn away, and who will certainly not return. The most obvious example is the first single, a version of modern-rock outfit Vertical Horizon’s previously unremarkable “Best I Ever Had” that Allan transforms into something affecting by dint of the vulnerability in his sunburnt tenor and an arrangement that lays bare the lilting, slightly bruised melody.
The sadness permeating Tough All Over builds over its 12 tracks before exploding on the epic closer, the Allan original “Putting My Misery on Display.” Allan lures us in with elements of his autobiography (“I was raised with the West Coast bands”), before, in the scarifyingly naked third verse, admitting to a longing for sensual intimacy. All those elements come together in the sardonic chorus: “I don’t know any other way / Than putting my misery on display.” It’s an indictment of both performer (for making money off pain) and listener (for getting off on hearing about it), and it forces the preceding 41 minutes to sink their teeth into their own tail.
The self-laceration of “Putting My Misery on Display” is bearable only because the way out of the nihilism that suffuses Tough All Over has already been glimpsed several songs before—and like Reznor, Allan owes his turning point to Cash. The centerpiece of Tough All Over is Jamie O’Hara’s “Nickajack Cave (Johnny Cash’s Redemption),” a song that recounts how, in 1967, a suicidal Cash wandered into the cave in question with no intention of ever coming out again. According to legend, after hours of crawling into the deep caverns, Cash had a revelation that he was not in charge of his destiny, that only God could decide when it would be his time to die.
“Every man has to come to a crossroads somewhere along the way,” Allan speaks at the outset of the track, a jarring interruption of the album’s musical flow that announces something vital is about to be communicated. “Johnny Cash came to his crossroads in a place called Nickajack Cave.”
The song straightforwardly recounts the tale, climaxing as Cash hears the voice of God saying, “I ain’t through with you yet, Johnny Cash, get up.” Cash finds his way out of the cave, “tears and dirt smeared on his face / As peaceful as could be,” and in that moment becomes the Man in Black, given a mission and transformed into myth by the Almighty. Allan makes no such claims for himself, obviously, but the clarity and force in his voice make clear that he identifies with Cash’s sorrow and his renewed determination to survive.
On the surrounding songs, Allan describes the landscape of an emotional Nickajack Cave. He sings about the hopelessness that drives a man into a deep, dark hole, about a pain so overpowering you have to hurt yourself to see if you still feel. But as “Nickajack Cave” fades out, he has let us in on a wonderful secret: that even in the depths of a seemingly endless cavern, a man can find the sheer force of will and love of life to guide him back into daylight.