The fifth in a series of posts on my favourite Non-Album Tracks (i.e. songs never released by their artists on studio albums). This one’s a song I took a while getting into, by an act I took a while getting into.
Nine Inch Nails – ‘Burn’
Released on:
Natural Born Killers [Soundtrack - 1994]
When I saw Nine Inch Nails live for the first time – at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, July 2005 – I decided to take a strategic mid-set bathroom break during ‘Burn’. It was not a song I knew too well, so felt it was better to go then, lest I find myself having to go later on, during something that I truly did not want to miss. The same thing happened earlier that year, when I saw R.E.M. touring the questionable Around the Sun album: as soon as they started playing ‘Electron Blue’, I made a beeline for the jacks. In both cases, it worked out quite well. In the R.E.M. gig, I came back to two New Adventures… classics, ‘Electrolite’ and ‘Undertow’; in Glasgow, I returned to the floor to catch a crowd-enlivening Downward Spiral double of ‘Closer’ and ‘Reptile’. Fairly decent, although it wasn’t the most optimal piss-point in the gig: if had been able to hang on a few songs more, I might have been able to avoid having to stand through the interminable yawnfest that is ‘The Day the World Went Away’. Alas…
Let’s backtrack a bit. Much like Smashing Pumpkins, I didn’t start listening to Trent Reznor until quite a bit after the peak of his popularity. Of course, the video for ‘Closer’ made an impression, as I imagine it does with everyone who sees it. But this was entirely down to what my eyes – not my ears – were taking in. This was long before my allergy to anything electronic was cured by Primal Scream. Indeed, this was the reason I was initially resistant to the attempts of a friend to get me into Nine Inch Nails. This was in the early stages of a lengthy mix-tape/-CD exchange, which began with a conversation relating to Sonic Youth, during which I, High Fidelity-style, offered to make a tape.
I did listen to the homemade NIN compilation I received. A couple of times. But it did not fit my guitars-only tastes of the time at all. I think the first song on it was a remix of ‘Terrible Lie’. Me of early 2001 (I think that’s when this was) was not going to be swayed by a tracklist that featured song titles with parenthesized remix names. But one song cut through all this. It didn’t seem that electronic at all. I mean, I knew that there was a lot of electronic stuff going on in the track. But it didn’t sound “electronic”. It was fast, heavy and LOUD. That song was ‘Wish’.
In an ensuing conversation, I mentioned how ‘Wish’ stood out for me. A follow-up mix-CD I received a few weeks later was a lot heavier. And I got into it a lot more. I noticed that my favourite track on the second CD, like ‘Wish’, was originally released on Broken. A few months later, while in Belgium of all places, I found a cheap secondhand copy of Broken and bought it. (That other favourite track, which probably remains to this day my absolute favourite NIN track, was ‘Gave Up’.)
My Primal Scream-lead burgeoning acceptance of synthesizers and programmed beats fed my growing love of NIN – and vice versa. I bought every release I could find. At that point in time – 12 or 13 years into the existence of Nine Inch Nails, that consisted of a lot of singles, EPs and remix compilations – but only three studio albums. (By comparison: R.E.M., in their first 12 years, released nine.) Did this lead to a greater emphasis on non-album tracks? Not really. The albums – The Downward Spiral and The Fragile especially – seemed to tower over everything else in the NIN canon and got the vast bulk of my attention. I certainly never found myself rushing to listen to Things Falling Apart…
I can’t remember when it was that I first heard the studio version ‘Burn’. I had heard – and mostly ignored, due to my ignorance of it – the performance of it in a bootleg of NIN’s Woodstock ’94 performance. It wasn’t when I bought the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, because that happened a good bit later. It must have been when I saw the video:
I can kind of see why I didn’t really get it at first. It takes a long long time to get going. You could fit one or two Pixies songs in there by the time it kicks off. It certainly did not have the urgency nor immediacy of songs like ‘Wish’ or ‘March of the Pigs’. But by then, I was appreciating the less in your face stuff too (and ‘Burn’ is still quite in your face when it gets in there).
I think the song’s main disadvantage was actually the very fact that it wasn’t on an album. As I said above, it was those to which I was listening the most. The absence of ‘Burn’ on any major Nine Inch Nails release meant that it just didn’t get any airtime for me. It never got the chance to grow on me.
This, of course, is the inherent disadvantage of the non-album track. Or was. Back then, listening to music was, for me, still a matter of taking a case off a shelf, taking the CD out and then putting it in a player of some kind. Nowadays, everything just goes on your MP3 player and can appear instantaneously.
If that Barrowland gig had been just a year or two later, I would have welcomed ‘Burn’ as a great song to hear, instead of as an ideal moment to relieve my bladder. Because the song, after I did get myself an MP3 player (to take my music collection to Japan), really did grow on me. I started to love it: its clattering drum loop; Trent’s bitter, angry megaphone vocal; the building layers of menacing tension, first with an inquisitive keyboard line – then a far less subtle bass synth; and then that bit where it really does kick off, when he’s “gonna burn this whole world down”.
The song (and the video) (and the soundtrack album as a whole) definitely captured the feeling of the film too. This was Reznor’s first attempt at writing music for a film. This would prove quite a rewarding medium for him – and us listeners. His recent score for The Social Network was outstanding – and bagged him an Oscar too. And in between ‘Burn’ and that, he delivered another two great non-album tracks: one from a very good film; one from a not very good film.
I did eventually get my chance to appreciate ‘Burn’ live properly. Twice in fact: it made the setlist on the second and third NIN performances I saw – Osaka in May 2007 and at the 2009 Summer Sonic Festival (also in Osaka). They were great.
I’ll leave you with what that 2009 performance of ‘Burn’ might have looked something like (one of Rob Sheridan’s great stage-shot videos – this one from Melbourne): Enjoy!
