How To Destroy Angels - How To Destroy Angels (Review)

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After putting aside Nine Inch Nails, which has always been just Trent Reznor with the occasional collaborator, the industrial visionary has returned with the debut EP from How To Destroy Angels, a collaboration with his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, and frequent studio accomplice, Atticus Ross.

Reznor creates brooding textures better than perhaps anyone else in the world and rather than a great departure, the How To Destroy Angels EP for the most part simply dips into the various pots of recent NIN releases and switches vocal duties to Maandig. Bypassing guttural, anthemic fury, the EP lifts a lot of the ambient textures from the Ghosts I-IV release, and the glitch groove of Year Zero throughout the middle few tracks.

When opener, ‘The Space in Between’ begins, rhythmically, melodically, lyrically, there’s no secret who wrote it. You can almost hear Reznor’s distinctive enunciation shadowing Maandig’s vocal line, as ever more menacing drones have a go at “filling the spaces in between”. The thing with Maandig is not that she isn’t a good vocalist; she just isn’t as good as Reznor. The new opportunities offered with a different and particularly with a female vocalist end up softening the impact rather than heightening the emotion. This effect reciprocates the ambient quality of the music, but breathes little life into the dread and menace. For the most part Maandig is another synthesized drone in a collage of synthesized drones, albeit a particularly lovely one. There is a harmony between her vocals and the music but few stand out moments.

‘The Believers’ develops Year Zero’s glitch noise and though it hasn’t quite got where it’s going, it shows Reznor experimenting and developing within what is really a comfortable and familiar project. The EP’s closer, ‘A Drowning’ has a verse and chorus straight from one of the solid NIN ballads of recent years, very much in the vein of ‘Zero Sum’ or ‘Lights in the Sky’, and Maandig’s restrained vocal performance suits the melody’s distinctly Reznorian arrangement. The piano in the verse meanders and underscores. It’s the same apocalyptic twinkling we’ve seen from Reznor throughout his career, but bugger me if doesn’t still work. Like a lot of the record, there’s a sense of Reznor on autopilot, which aside from a touch of disappointment, actually underlines his instinctive gift for arrangement.

How To Destroy Angels is ultimately a little half baked and a little too much like what Reznor has done better on the last couple of Nine Inch Nails records. This isn’t to say it’s bad; it’s actually quite good, if a little pedestrian in parts, though there are enough promising qualities to suggest potential in future releases.

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