Thought Sausage

Somehow I totally missed that this was coming out (or perhaps Trent just dropped it outta nowhere). But last night, Ghosts (the mp3's at least) were released. I've been letting it cycle through all night. Basically what you get is 36 tracks that essentially is wannabe Berlin-Era-Bowie tunes. Sometimes that much is painfully (or embarassingly?) obvious. It's all instrumental. When I first heard of the sheer volume of tunes (36?!) and 'instrumental' my first hunch was that this was going to be nothing more than outtakes and unusable sequences that didn't fit on any of his recent outtings. After a couple times through each track...I don't think that's what we get. In fact, I'll go as far as to say its actually not half bad. I've caught a few instances where he's either quoting or straight up rehashing old Fragile tunes, but you'll have that I guess. It certainly doesn't measure up to Callisto whatsoever, but I don't know that was Trent's intention.

That said...now that Trent is 'out of his contract' I suppose this is what we're in for. Massive doses of output that he can put out whenever it suits his fancy (of course, all the people downloading these proceeded to crash his site..good job kids). I know what you're thinking: "dave, how on earth would the single most pretentious artist this side of Prince sleep knowing his output was merely in the form of mp3's?". Well true to form, you can buy this collection of instrumentals in various hardcopy versions...one of which is a $300 (really?!) "collectors edition" that includes vinyls (seriously?!) of all these tracks. I find that funny because I don't know of a single vinyl enthusiast (save for maybe a couple DJ's) that would give two shits and a rolling donut about a new NIN album on vinyl (much less anything post Fragile). There's a lot of analog synthy sounds that prolly do sound pretty fat on vinyl, but certainly not $300 fat.

that said, the $5 you spend to get all these is most certainly worth it. It's good background music...not to engaging, and nothing here that is going to win over any uninitiated (as I imagine anybody who is a fan of the Bowie/Eno stuff probably is well aware of what Trent's been doing the past 18 odd years).

This whole 'direct release' thing like what NIN, Radiohead and others are doing is proving to be an interesting situation. On one hand, this definitely makes it easier for Trent to get work out. On the other, not having a label in there acting as a filter between the end listener and the artist could be a bad thing. I don't care who the artist is, everybody has good work and shitty work. Labels have served to some extent as a quality control because they are only interested in music they can sell (for better or for worse I guess...but I've heard plenty of stories from artists who can't put an album out because the label 'doesn't hear a single'). Maybe that is kind of a good thing? Cos while I can't say for sure, I'm pretty sure Trent couldn't release an album with 36 instrumental tracks on Interscope. Not in the form he's doing it now. And of these 36, I'd say 15 of 'em sound like self-indulgent experiments. Basically they don't serve to benefit the overall output. I know with my own work, the first IK album could ahve been 4-5 songs thinner and thus, a way more effective album. But self releasing it as we did...we just put out everything we had committed to tape.

So...eh..if ya wanna hear Trent make a bunch of noises with some standouts here and there...this is definitely worth your 5 bucks (better pay up too cos now Trent's got a big old bandwidth bill haha)