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Album review: How to Destroy Angels’ ‘How to Destroy Angels’

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Post-NIN, Angels kick up goth beat

Last year Trent Reznor announced that he was retiring Nine Inch Nails, his groundbreaking industrial-rock outfit, as a touring band. This six-song EP by How to Destroy Angels — a new trio featuring Reznor, his wife Mariqeen Maandig and frequent Reznor collaborator Atticus Ross — suggests that the NIN drawdown had less to do with Reznor’s road fatigue and more to do with a return to the pleasures of recording: With its tick-tocking death-disco beats and its precisely designed blasts of digital fuzz, “How to Destroy Angels” might be the best-sounding work Reznor has ever done. Few musicians get as much feeling out of electronic equipment as he does.

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Yet as songs go, tracks such as “The Space in Between,” “Fur-Lined” and the seven-minute “A Drowning” rank among Reznor’s least compelling; even with Maandig’s appealingly breathy vocals, they often seem like outtakes from NIN’s recent instrumental set, “Ghosts I-IV.” One exception is “BBB,” in which Maandig (a former member of L.A.’s West Indian Girl) coos, “Listen to the sound of my big black boots,” over a funky electro-goth groove punctuated by what appears to be a group of foot soldiers on the move. It’s the rare moment that combines Reznor’s old tune-craft with some of his old humor.

— Mikael Wood

How to Destroy Angels
“How to Destroy Angels”
(The Null Corporation)
Two and a half stars


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