Reviews: Nine Inch Nails, Now! 27

Reviews: Nine Inch Nails, Now! 27

Nine Inch Nails 'Ghosts I-IV': Aidin Vaziri | Nine Inch Nails stunned its fans by dropping its latest album online two weeks ago. Following Radiohead's pay-what-you-want lead, newly free agent Trent Reznor (left) offered the first nine of the 36 songs from "Ghosts I-IV" as free downloads with a PBS telethon-style opportunity to upgrade to the rest of the set for $5, add a CD for $10 or buy a series of packages with all kinds of extra content starting at $70. Unfortunately, the 2,500 copies of the "ultra-deluxe limited edition" box for $300 sold out before we even had a chance to fire up the computer. Just as well, since "Ghosts" is hardly a conventional Nine Inch Nails album in any sense. It's a two-hour, four-part suite made up of 36 instrumental tracks flitting between melancholy piano passages and bursts of white noise with lots of funky interludes in between. What's missing is Reznor's voice, that primal instrument that over the years has so brilliantly brought together the industrial clatter with wounded proclamations such as, "I will make you hurt." Without the black-clad front man working himself into an absolute lather, this sprawling set seems not only unfocused but also unfinished. There's a good album somewhere amid all this ambient landscape, aching for someone to howl all over it. But without the military rule of an actual record label pushing him, Reznor has failed to find it.

'Now! That's What I Call Music 27': Aidin Vaziri | Everyone thinks pop music is busted because record stores are closing, labels are folding and radio plays only 20-year-old songs by Billy Idol and Tears for Fears. But this latest chart sampler proves that things have never been better. The 20 tracks are nothing less than epic - Britney Spears' "Piece of Me," Timbaland and One Republic's "Apologize," Kanye West's "Flashing Lights," Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music" - even Fergie's "Clumsy." Sorry. All that's missing is Gwen Stefani's stratospheric remix of "Now That You Got It." Even in the glory days of 1998, these compilations were saddled with some filler thrust forward by a third-rate ska band. Here, even the so-called rock tunes, such as Paramore's "Crushcrushcrush" and Boys Like Girls' "Hero/Heroine," are laced with heavy pop sugar. Does anyone have a transformer that can make me a teenage girl again?