How to Destroy Angels
“The Space in Between”
from How to Destroy Angels
The Null Corporation, June 2010
Download it free or buy it from How to Destroy Angels
It’s the way this song — from Trent Reznor’s new band with his wife Mariqueen Maandig and his frequent collaborator Atticus Ross — does and doesn’t sound like a pair of his previous band’s songs that strikes me. Lyrically, you could do a line-for-line swap with Nine Inch Nails’ “All the Love in the World” and literally not miss a beat — that’s how deeply Maandig has apparently internalized her husband’s aesthetic. (Example: “Watching all the insects march along / Seem to know just right where they belong” vs. “Blinding light illuminates the scene / Try to fill the spaces in between.” Try it!) And indeed the music itself is very NIN, albeit not so much the “return to rock radio” pummeling of “All the Love in the World”‘s source album With Teeth as the ominous droning and knowingly tinny, clicky programming of subsequent records like Year Zero and The Slip. And all that is fine — I am a big, big NIN fan and learned long ago that you don’t switch on Reznor’s latest record expecting to be surprised by a new set of thematic concerns.
But the bigness of “The Space in Between”‘s final chorus — twice as long as the first iteration, beefed up with echoey overdubbed harmonies, lifted aloft on the crest of a guitar that’s suddenly gone from a drone to a roar — reminds me of an entirely different NIN song, and one of my favorites at that, precisely because it is surprising: the title track from The Fragile. That song starts quiet and ominous, then reveals its intent with at-the-time stunningly kind and direct lyrics, then blossoms into an unexpectedly big chorus the second time around, then cuts away for a bridge and Reznor’s most emotional guitar solo to date before exploding into an absolutely massive third and final chorus — a chorus of Reznors given the full “Freddie Mercury treatment,” a whole new set of lyrics screamed near the top of Reznor’s range on top of the original lyrics, a shift to a major key, the works. “The Space in Between” echoes “The Fragile”‘s structure but never gets to that tear-down-the-sky point, cutting off abruptly after chorus #2. The result? I listen to the song on loop, waiting and waiting for that missing final section, for a catharsis that never comes — which is a very Reznor concept. Well played.