Nine Inch Nails: "Came Back Haunted"

Trent Reznor is officially the Too $hort of EBM: retiring for good his bread-and-butter flagship Nine Inch Nails nearly three years ago to focus on film composing and other projects, only to unapolegetically announce a comeback tour this week. What gives? Shit if I know, but "Came Back Haunted" is one of his more radio-friendly tunes in years, even though I thoroughly dug Year Zero and The Slip (Ghosts I-IV was a bit harder to take seriously).

Hesitation Marks won't be out until September 3, but you can while away that time by wondering aloud what the fuck Reznor is doing back on a major label.

[EDIT 6/30/13: added the David Lynch-helmed music vid]:

1990: "Fun to Be Had", Nitzer Ebb

Coming off like a cross between the hip hop-informed Meat Beat Manifesto and the new wave-steeped A Split Second, "Fun to Be Had" either sounds like a groundbreaking classic or an aggro version of "Wham Rap", depending on one's post-millennial sensibilities. My own affections fall somewhere between those two extremes, but if anything these last few posts should show the widening gulf between many of the "old guard" and the new in the EBM / industrial overlap.

By 1990, many of the groups formed in the mid-80s found themselves floundering between heightened exposure of their musical niche and the skeletal, minimalist songwriting that had won them favor in the 80s but had since fallen out of style; not all, certainly, and many would rebound later with bigger budgets and forward thinking producers, but in the meantime there were plenty of stilted throwbacks like "Fun to Be Had": endearing yet fossilized, stagnant yet timeless, classic yet decidedly not...

1990: "The Parallax View", A Split Second

EBM - Electronic Body Music - was largely pioneered in the early-to-mid 80s by Belgian duo Front 242 as a new wave-inspired, dance-friendly take on the increasingly mechanistic beats of industrial music. Considered by most a subgenre of industrial, it also afforded a good deal of crossover potential with the burgeoning techno movement at the end of the 80s.

A Split Second were a little long in the tooth to be learning new tricks from acid house - unlike younger upstarts Meat Beat Manifesto, for instance - so "The Parallax View" sounds like it could have just as easily come out in 1984 as 1990, when it first appeared on the Kiss of Fury album... and yet ASS' 1986 debut single, Flesh, is often cited as the first New Beat record, a short lived micro-genre that directly inspired acid house and whose most famous artist, Praga Khan, would go on to be a key figure in early rave with his industrial-tinged Lords of Acid sect.

There were some solid remixes of "The Parallax View", but since the 12" single didn't come out until 1991 I'll stick with the 1990 album version for chronology's sake.

1990: "Danger", X Marks the Pedwalk

Coming in at the harder, more abrasive end of the EBM sound a la Skinny Puppy, X Marks the Pedwalk lifted their seemingly nonsensical moniker from a Fritz Leiber story, which is about as far as we looked into it since WKMR are not SF fans (besides, they're German, what more do you need to know?). XMTP were the first signing to then new Zoth Ommog Records, which arguably was the greatest and most influential of the industrial labels in the 1990s, despite not surviving that decade. One could also make the case for Metropolis Records, but Cleopatra can kiss our low rent asses.