Two albums came out in 1989 that changed music in a big way : Ministry's A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste and Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine. Most electronic music at that time was dance music. You had New Order, Erasure, & Depeche Mode at the top of the heap and most other bands tended to sound like one of them. Sure you had folks like Skinny Puppy, Nitzer Ebb, and KMFDM starting to branch out in more abstract or aggressive directions but those two albums somehow combined everything I liked about electronic sounds with everything I liked about angry guitar music in a way that nobody really had before. They were kinda dancy and they also kinda rocked. Each album had a larger ratio of one or the other but they both worked and forced me to keep them close at hand for at least 6 moths or so after I bought them. A ton of other people felt the same way as it turned out, and for a short while Industrial music was was the new hotness on college campuses, and later on mainstream radio as well.
I'm not sure how long it had been since I dusted off Pretty Hate Machine for a listen, thankfully Mr. Reznor decided to give me a good reason to do so. First off, it's sounds fucking amazing. There hasn't been much tinkering with the mix which is always a good thing. What you really get is a crisp, better defined sound with a little larger dynamic range that people just didn't have the ability to produce on CD with the mastering technology available back in the day.
The packaging has been updated as well. You get a nice new digipack format with slightly toned-down artwork that, for me, is a welcome change. The old-school pink and purple cover really never meshed well with all the other albums.
As far as bonus features go there's only one real extra: a cover of Queen's Get Down Make Love which was previously only available on the out-of-print Sin single. Jourgensen was involved in the recording to some extent and you can tell a big difference between that and the rest of the album. Not bad, but much closer to the way Ministry was doing things at the time. What would have been nice.....was to have a 2nd disk similar to the Downward Spiral remaster with b-sides and remixes but none of the remixes from this era are included. Too bad since that's one thing that Reznor is really good at. Most remixes at the time were almost always labeled "extended dance remix" and meant that somebody looped the intro drumbeats at the beginning and end of the song for an extra minute or two. Reznor's remixes tend to be more creative and quite different from the original, worth listening to outside of a club or a party for sure. Hopefully we'll get them on some sort of later release since TVT no longer holds the rights to the songs.
Nerdy nitpicking aside, Pretty Hate Machine holds up really well after 21 years. If you haven't taken it for an angsty spin in a while now's your chance.
