Word: spirals
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Until now. Come, ye pilgrims, down the spiral staircase to nowhere leading down from the Lowell House dining hall, enter the tastefully unmarked doors, into the bathroom. Mirrors on one wall conscientiously placed above sinks, a row of stalls on the right and urinals tucked behind a wall; this is the monument to the co-ed bathroom, a sense that a community that eats together can share all aspects of that experience...
...wrinkled cotton shirt and a grungy pair of jeans, Reznor blends in so easily with the bohemian types streaming past him on a Greenwich Village sidewalk that it's easy to forget he is the auteur behind one of the landmark albums of the decade, 1994's The Downward Spiral, as well as an architect of the dark offshoot of heavy metal and punk called industrial rock. His themes of alienation and distress have influenced artists from Marilyn Manson to Oliver Stone. This week Reznor is making a return with a challenging new album, The Fragile (Nothing/Interscope), a work that...
...Downward Spiral's impact still reverberates through the rock world. Its raging guitars and walloping percussion are more aggressive than anything that came before. The record was a Kafkaesque critique of an industrial world filled with poison-spewing factories and desolate, ruined people. Its harrowing music, for better or worse, established Reznor and his band, Nine Inch Nails, as one of the few fresh voices rock has produced since Kurt Cobain. But in the view of some social critics, its X-rated imagery made Reznor the spiritual sire of school violence and corrupted youth...
...Fragile has very little fat on it, and in the age of the Backstreet Boys, it courageously dares to not pander to radio. The album has an organic feel, with little of the machine-like velocity and crushing density of Spiral. Reznor leaves breaks in the sonic wall this time, allowing the songs to breathe. He drives home a subtle message of uplift by filling the open spaces with soft, surprising textures rarely found in rock: cellos, violins, a ukulele here and there, and a tinkling piano--many of those played by Reznor himself, who also does most...
...longer does the threat of a midterm draw students to class. Section quizzes on lecture material mean not a thing. Forever gone are hand cramps, loose-leaf paper, lost pen caps and spiral notebooks; a syllabus to follow the reading material and a computer with Internet access provide a more compact and complete explanation of the course...