Ghosts I

Nine Inch Nails released a new album on Sunday entitled Ghosts I-IV. That's nice, and I would normally just go acquire it via unethical means, however, this is different. They decided to release it via a non-conventional approach, following suit from Radiohead, though by a different method.



The albums consists of 4 discs cleverly titled: Ghosts I, Ghosts II, Ghosts III, and Ghosts IV. There are a few ways to acquire this music. The most noteworthy part about this is that they are offering Ghosts I for free on their site. (Though be warned, it's been flooded with hits, and has been up and down a lot throughout the day so far.)

Additionally, they have officially uploaded it on to the Pirate Bay, a torrent site. This is a great idea, because it spreads the information via peer to peer sharing rather than solely relying on their webserver, which is being hit pretty hard anyway. Trent Reznor, the frontman for Nine Inch Nails has been an active supporter of filesharing, and even publicly announced that he was a member of the infamous private torrent site, OiNK.

The rest of the set, Ghosts II-IV is available for purchase (in high quality MP3 format) from their site, or Amazon, for only $5. To purchase the physical CDs will cost you $10. They also have various special editions which go all the way up to $300.

Now, how is the music itself though? I downloaded (via the official Pirate Bay torrent) Ghosts I last night, and listened to it this morning. Trent described the album as "a soundtrack for daydreams". Ghosts I has 9 tracks: 1 Ghosts I, 2 Ghosts I, 3 Ghosts I, etc. (Again with the clever naming scheme.)

My thoughts:
1 Ghosts I: Reminded me of the Downward Spiral. (That's a good thing.)
2 Ghosts I: One of only two tracks that actually reminded me "dream music".
3 Ghosts I: Sounded like generic industrial music, minus the lyrics.
4 Ghosts I: Definitely sounded like Nine Inch Nails, though I can't quite place from which 'era'.
5 Ghosts I: The second "dream music" track.
6 Ghosts I: Repetitive and somehow soothing.
7 Ghosts I: More standard industrial fare.
8 Ghosts I: See '4 Ghosts I' description.
9 Ghosts I: Similar to track 1, but not as good.

I liked 1 and 8 the best, and I did like all of the tracks. I'll be buying Ghosts II-IV (just the MP3's) sometime, and will maybe post my thoughts, or maybe not. Keep in mind, me buying music is pretty big. I've only bought maybe 4 CDs produced by record labels over the course of my life. I've bought a decent amount of stuff put out by friends' bands and such, but I feel I need to support this method of distribution, plus I liked the music. I would have also purchased Radiohead's 'In Rainbows', because of their unique distribution method, but I rather despise their music. Pitchfork wrote an entertaining line about the album, which I'll end with:
'For free you get the first nine tracks of Ghosts in "high-quality MP3 files" that are "100% DRM-free" and "encoded with LAME at 320kbps". (Yeah yeah, insert snotty joke about every Nine Inch Nails record since The Downward Spiral being encoded with lame here.)'

Godspeed.



This posted tagged as: music