This is the obvious choice, but in the end it's also the correct one. If Trent Reznor had done nothing else The Downward Spiral would still be one of the most important achievements in pop music, right up there with Dark Side of the Moon, Pet Sounds, Tommy, and the White Album. In retrospect his two previous efforts were drafts leading up to this opus, and everything that he's done since has been an effort to top, to match, or to distance himself from The Downward Spiral. With this album Reznor not only set a high bar for music as a whole, he set an unreachable challenge for himself that would loom over the rest of his career. For a perfectionlist like Reznor, that shadow must have been a sort of a hell.



The Downward Spiral came at the turning point in digital recording and compositoin, and Reznor the one-man band, the drop-out computer programmer, seized this jagged edge as his opportunity. With the right samplers and keyboards and sequencing software he didn't need a back-up band. He didn't need to explain his vision to anyone. He didn't even have to hew to what was physically possible.



What Reznor turned out was a sort of a golem; all of his deepest, most vulnerable emotions, given form by a patchwork of real sounds twisted out of easy recognition, and animated with crunching, brittle digital noise. The songwriting scuttles along in mixmatched hunks of rock, swing, noise metal, a sort of decayed disco, and acoustic ballad.



For all its darkness, there is also humor. Nearly every song is graced with one or more practical jokes, meant to unsettle the listener. Take the live favorite March of the Pigs, which starts with a wall of noise in a hard-to-process 7/8 meter, accompanied by the furious barking of orders: "Step right up! March! Push! Crawl right up on your knees!" After a verse or so the meter changes to a more comfortable 4/4 and the shouting calms to a poisonous sneer. Then, abruptly, all of the drive falls away in favor of a bright piano flourish. "Doesn't it make you feel better?" Reznor asks, his cheery tone a mask for roiling bitterness and sarcasm. Just as the listener cranes in close to hear the last ring of the piano chords, the A section returns from nowhere, as if to shout "BOO!" And so it goes.



For its ten-year anniversary (itself now a decade in the past) Reznor remastered The Downward Spiral, adjusting a few mastering errors and adding a second disc full of related material -- B-sides, early versions of album tracks, assorted ephemera. If you've yet to hear The Downward Spiral, this is probably the version to grab -- if for nothing else than for the inclusion of "Burn", from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack.