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I consider his decision to finally do proper film scores (after his sequenced soundtracks and original contributions to Natural Born Killers and Lost Highway) to be both completely organic and logical and, as others would agree, about damn time! From his and Ross’s opening composition “Hand Covers Bruise,” he crafts an unexpected but perfectly complementary accompaniment to Fincher’s and Sorkin’s portrait of the rise of the idea of a global community and the young man at the center of it all. As an Entertainment Weekly writer astutely noted, “[The] score is filled with a sense of regret for the things its characters are not even aware they are about to lose.” Knowing that Reznor and Fincher are collaborating again on the Rooney Mara version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is enough to pave over any qualms I might have about that being an unnecessary American remake.

I think the reason I like the above quote so much, aside from its insight, is that is speaks to a larger degree of openness and expansiveness that was missing in NIN’s early years. I’ll be talking more about the music than the lyrics as far as the remix albums go — and there’s an obvious reason for that — but part of the reason I drifted from NIN in the late ‘90s and early last decade is that I felt NIN’s universe, in toto, seemed to consist of a geography about the space and size of a broom closet. The closet had been well explored and no doubt interesting things still remained to be uncovered, but would they ever open up the door? To extend the metaphor across to a wholly different band, I adore The Hold Steady in part because I feel they are always striving to open up new rooms in an abode that must be up to five levels and Lord knows how many rooms at this point. And with Craig Finn’s carefully etched anecdotes circling back around to characters we have met before, we are never quite sure whom we might encounter at any given moment.

But my view on NIN began to change around the middle of last decade, driven in part by two unrelated incidents. I briefly dated a younger woman (for perspective, if she had been into Pretty Hate Machine upon its release, she would have been the hippest kindergartner in her class) who was obsessed with Nine Inch Nails, although she, like me, had not heard a lot of the single-only remixes and hadn’t listened to all of the remix albums available up to that point (late 2004). So she purchased and I checked out from the library and between us, I began to see bits and pieces of a larger picture. The relationship was over by Thanksgiving — valedictorily ushered in with an awkward and uncomfortable viewing of the Kinnear-Romijn-DeNiro thriller Godsend — but I would always have the music.

The second was the spring release of With Teeth in 2005 and being able to stream the album numerous times in the weeks before it hit stores. The first single “The Hand That Feeds” was a good early introduction and the snarling topical lyrics and classic NIN driving beat were a potent kick in the head to get me out of bed when it would pop up on my radio alarm clock several weeks in a row.

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