College Times

Year Zero is the most inspired album Trent Reznor has made since The Downward Spiral, an album that oozed pain and self-loathing within its digital chaos. It's one piece of a much larger concept that encompasses marketing schemes, internet buzz and fans' willingness to become immersed in a virtual reality game. It's also yet another flawed attempt at making a masterpiece, never truly connecting musically or lyrically, despite an interesting idea.

The conceptual foundation of Year Zero is that, in 15 years, America will be reborn as a Christian theocracy. It's a dystopian vision of the future, full of violence, injustice, destruction, hatred, fear and hopelessness. Included inside its obtuse "tale" - there's no true narrative, yet - are drugs put into the water by the government to control citizens; visions of four-fingered hands that may or may not be visitations from a higher being, another tool of manipulation by the government or weather effects caused by extreme global warming; soldiers, both within and outside of the government, destroying anyone that doesn't follow their beliefs; wholesale slaughter of Muslims within America; and always the government's control over everything, using religion to provide justification for tyranny and abuse.

The music feels toned down, as if Reznor wanted to make the story the focus. The lyrics tend to be vague and clumsy lines that are too obvious: "I got my propaganda, I got revisionism/I got my violence in high def ultra-realism" from "Survivalism," or "I pushed a button and elected him to office/He pushed a button and it dropped a bomb" in "Capital G."

The album only makes sense to those willing to invest the time to search through the game pieces online. There are little more than hints in the songs to what's gone on before and after Year Zero. While it makes the album open to interpretation, admittedly a good thing at this point in the game, it also makes it an album geared more toward diehard fans. Hopefully, this is just the first piece of a much more complex musical story; it may take another release to make this one feel successful.

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