These Nine Inch Nails definitive vinyl editions are stunning, both from a sound perspective and an artwork perspective.

I haven’t seen packaging this good for an album in FOREVER. Worth buying for the art alone. But they also sound superb.

Currently cranked: The Fragile

It’s funny, I was looking for great sounding stuff to listen to on my Walkman nights, where I leave my phone inside and go listen to an album start to finish in a hammock. I stumbled across a Reznor interview where they discussed the purpose of these vinyl reissues —

— and one of the driving ideas was the return to un-distracted album listening.

There is a certain amount of ceremony around vinyl. It is an awkward format — not very portable, lots of steps to get the music playing, hard to pause or skip. It is ideal for focusing on the album.

That resonated with me really strongly.

Now, I gave away my turntable and the vast majority of my records before I left Toronto whenever that was — 2011? And I have not bought another turntable.

I have been buying records here and there, especially when an artist sells signed vinyl direct on their website. I love big artwork. I love supporting musicians so that I can have more music to enjoy. So I have a shelf of unplayed records.

Something about that article about the NIN definitive vinyl issues really stuck with me, about the very deliberate and careful mastering process. I wanted to hear these remasters.

Good news: the records come with download codes for lossless digital versions.

So I bought them.

There was a moment this evening where I was transported back to high school — sitting in front of the stereo, pouring over the minutiae of the liner notes and artwork while listening to an album. I have missed that something fierce.

So in the spirit of the thing, I unsealed the artwork, put on the album (digitally), no pausing and no skipping, and gave it my full attention.

There were so many moments of pure delight. Some were sonic — The Fragile’s “drowning in acid” production sound is still stunning.

And some were visual, like noticing the perfect and precise spot treatments on the album cover.

So there were a lot of holy shit moments in these records and I’m going to share just one, the one that blew my mind.

Broken is presented as a single-sided 12” LP plus a 7” containing the hidden tracks from the CD. The blank side of the 12” has a funky spiral thing etched on it.

The spiral looked really organic, like something you’d make if you were vandalizing a park bench with a knife. I looked closer.

Wow.

WOW.

Ok I just read Bob Ezrin’s liner notes for The Fragile and my mind is blown even more than it was before

Here’s the vinyl mission statement from their website. I love everything about it.

For those of you complaining that these tweets made you spend hundreds of dollars on records, I just went to the website and ordered two more, so I also DID IT TO MYSELF

I had weird dreams about this album all night.

Reading Bob Ezrin’s liner notes for The Fragile, his story of listening to four hours of music and trying to construct an emotional narrative out of it that fit onto two CDs, was mind-blowing. Hell, these liner notes are worth the purchase price! https://twitter.com/trekkie/status/1303321646653222916