Halo Иineteen

I received an email this morning telling me that Nine Inch Nails' newest album, With Teeth, which is to be released on 3 May is now available in its entirety online. The album is indeed up at NIN's page at Myspace, a website which is pretty interesting in itself. Many tracks on the album remind me in some manner of "The Perfect Drug," which NIN released on The Lost Highway soundtrack. Sometimes the connection is in the sound; sometimes it's in the lyrics. I kind of think of it as an explosion of that one song, and the result is quite good. The album is tightly constructed and impressively organized. It's not as beautiful as The Fragile, but beauty is not the goal of this album. It's an album of energy, and it succeeds. It packs the power of NIN's inconsistent debut album Pretty Hate Machine into a work that is a cohesive as The Downward Spiral. Trent Reznor's falsetto on "All the Love in the World" and "Sunspots" is particularly exciting. It's not strong enough to be used for long durations, but it's highly effective used as is. Reznor is a talented musician, no doubt, and his stuff still has so much edge that it seems strange that he'll be turning forty in May. I feel like he should be exempt from aging.

Nat and I took two of the art history professors to lunch today. Prof. Menocal, who prefers to go by Narciso, and Prof. Buenger both wrote letters of recommendation for me during my (successful) bid to gain admission to an architecture school. Prof. Buenger wrote a letter for Nat as well. We ate at the Great Dane Pub, where my mother took me one Saturday during my first semester here. I had a "Full Monte Christo" and I enjoyed it greatly. I wish I could take my favorite professors with me to the next school. I'd gladly take both Narciso and Prof. Buenger along with Prof. McDonald (from whom I learned Russian History) and Prof. Begam (with whom I currently have James Joyce).