There it is again. That nagging little piano line, a gentle tease of notes lingering in a wide-open, empty space, at once gentle and piercing, like a whispered threat of violence, like the haunted tolling of a wind chime in a place where nobody lives anymore. The first time I heard it, I was living in a basement with the rest of my family - all of us in one large room with dirty green carpet and the poorly taxidermized remains of various Wisconsin fauna hanging on the wall. And the footsteps from upstairs that made our - no, this place is not ours - that made the ceiling creak and wheeze. I just want something...

That was the year that I started having the "suffocation" dreams, waking up gasping for breath. I slept on a beanbag chair. I delineated a small bit of square footage in the basement as "my bedroom", fencing it off with my boombox and the cardboard boxes of my stuff, moved, but not really unpacked from the old house - the house we'd lost. My fault? Probably not, but I blamed myself for it. I raged about it. I'd walk by the house on my way home from school to stand and look at it and hate that it wasn't ours anymore. I just want something...

"I need some rage music today", I told Stewart as we got into the car to go have lunch with his sisters (who live with a different family). We'd spent the week between Christmas and New Year's Day moving from the house James and I bought three years ago - the house we'd promised ourselves we'd stay in as we settled into "favorite unclehood" - into a new house to accommodate our somewhat unexpected family. I was sore, crabby, tired. The kids were driving me nuts. James was driving me nuts. But most of all, moving was driving me nuts. That said, there was also an element of satisfaction in it - like I was getting revenge at the past. Only that past - which had made me so angry for so long, which had, for years, driven a wedge between my dad and me - didn't loom so large for me anymore. I was over it. I am over it. I got the something I could never have.

So now what?

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Listening to Pretty Hate Machine, the debut album by Nine Inch Nails, in the car with Stewart on the weekend of our move into a new house, the likes of which I never truly believed I might one day call my own, was a strange experience - simultaneously connective and disconnective. I will always associate the self-pity, the self-loathing, and the explosive rage of Pretty Hate Machine with my family's almost-homelessness in the fall and winter of 90-91, my senior year in high school. I will always feel hints of my 17-year-old self in the defiant faithlessness of a song like "Terrible Lie", and the slow, cold, stormy resignation of "Something I Can Never Have", which creeps stealthily to a moment of catharsis that it knows all along it will steal away from us, never rising to more than an empty warehouse hush amidst the industrial cacophony the song interrupts.

But to me, the pleasures of Pretty Hate Machine are now largely nostalgic. It feels inauthentic for me to say that I love it, or to talk about how important the record is to me, because I don't feel like I need this music as much as I did half my life ago. Pretty Hate Machine is fun for me these days, where it used to be meaningful. As opposed to a record like Midnight Oil's Blue Sky Mining, whose meaningfulness has evolved for me over the last 17 years, Pretty Hate Machine is flat and static. Every time I listen to it, it always feels "about" the same thing - rage, sex, religion, loudness. It's self-absorption is as appealingly decadent as it is finally empty.

What I didn't expect then was how instantaneously Stewart connected to Trent Reznor's rage. Or maybe I was just projecting. But in the quietness of "Something I Can Never Have" (especially hearing it on his way to a visit with his siblings), Stewart's apparent meditative immersion in the raw anger of the song was nearly visible. If Pretty Hate Machine will pretty much always mean the same thing to me, it also appears that its "rage" is vague enough to be universal and cross-generational. As much, or more than, say, anything by My Chemical Romance, I can picture my 12-year-old son obsessing about Pretty Hate Machine throughout his teenage years, only to look back fondly at its silliness years later (the way I look back at Pink Floyd's The Wall, maybe.)

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Certainly, Pretty Hate Machine has achieved a kind of touchstone status since its release at the turn of the 90s. It's certainly one of the more iconic albums of the pre-Nevermind "alternative", largely because it did for industrial music (albeit on a smaller scale) what Nirvana would do for Seattle grunge in '91. That is, it made it pop. Reznor took the sounds that Cabaret Voltaire, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Front 242 and Einsturzende Neubauten had been working on for the previous decade, and made them accessible enough to appeal to teenage girls just outgrowing there New Kids on the Block phase and AV club boys who couldn't relate to Jani Lane's ozone-obliterating, golden, feathered locks.

What ultimately saves Pretty Hate Machine from being the embarrassing relic of one's teenage years it so clearly could be - until the long-delayed release of the album's brutal follow-up EP Broken, Trent Reznor was shaping up as the David Cassidy of the goth/industrial set - is that it so clearly has real sonic and musical ambition that occasionally comes to beautiful (and, in the case of "Something I Can Never Have", agonizing) fruition. Every track here is painstakingly layered with do-it-yourself craftsmanship and devotion. Try to pick out every little sound and motif going on in a track like "Head Like a Hole" or the fidgety prom-night-from-hell come-on "Kinda I Want To", and you're likely to find yourself maneuvering through an impenetrable sonic thicket. But even in the sparer moments, the production still catches us off guard. In the otherwise straightforward "Sanctified" a half-second shrieking blip of sound like metal grinding on metal provides each line of the chorus with an out-of-nowhere exclamation point.

And, okay, despite every clumsy high-school study hall lyric - debut single "Down In It" features one of the most insipid raps since Debbie Harry rhymed about men from Mars eating cars and bars - Reznor certainly knows his way around both pop hooks (the propulsive "Sin" so begs to be covered by Britney) and arena rock bombast. How chantable is the chorus of "Head Like a Hole", and how hard does Reznor drill that chant into our brains, repeating it so often that our own vocal concurrence becomes an involuntary response. No way you can get through that song without singing along. Reznor rages against a machine, even as he turns us all into a machine of his own. All of this makes Pretty Hate Machine an irresistible listen, if also a largely insubstantial one.

There are moments of real poetry here, but they are rarely found in Reznor's lyrics. It's more in those lingering piano notes, the negative spaces, those inexplicable blips of shrieking noise that have us checking our speakers to make sure that's actually part of the music. Pretty Hate Machine is an album that will endure because of the post-adolescent rage in its messages - it's pretty universal in that respect - but what really makes the album worth listening to over and over (and it is worth listening to over and over) is how it all sounds. That haunted piano line speaks more to me than just about anything Reznor actually sings.

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"Pretty Hate Machine" by Nine Inch Nails
TVT Records
Released 1989

Produced by Flood, Adrian Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc, John Fryer, Trent Reznor
48 min.

SONGS: Head Like a Hole - Terrible Lie - Down In It - Something I Can Never Have - Sanctified - Kinda I Want To - Sin - That's What I Get - The Only Time - Ringfinger

Recommended: Yes