Customer Rating: 
Summary: sick as
Comment: i hell like this. one of my favourites, its good to chill to and put you in the mood.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A bit difficult as a whole, but many excellent individual tracks.
Comment: The revitalization of Nine Inch Nails might be the coolest story in popular music this decade. Eighteen whole years after Trent Reznor's first album made him an idol of alienated teenagers throughout the land, he mounted a powerful comeback with Year Zero. The teenage angst was replaced by ominous prophecies of doom, and the soundtrack was a combination of harsh digital noise with some of Reznor's most accessible songwriting, with a modern electronic production.
After that, Trent regained his confidence. Instead of disappearing for five years, as he had done before, he took only a year to release Ghosts I-IV, an entirely instrumental double album that greatly recalls Aphex Twin's 1994 exercise in minimalism, Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2. Even the presentation is similar -- two discs of untitled tracks, each represented only by a photograph. Except Trent does it better. Many of the photographs (not included in the CD package, unfortunately, but you can download them for free from NIN's website) are beautiful. The muted shots of sky and water fit the mood of the soft tracks very well.
More than that, Ghosts I-IV is generally more enjoyable than Aphex Twin's opus. Even the less memorable tracks are, at least, listenable, and most of them are fairly short, so even if your attention starts flagging here and there, at least the record still moves between tones fairly briskly. Whereas Aphex Twin's record had a lot of really beautiful pieces, but also a lot of blatant listener abuse. (2:11, anyone?) This record is not like that. There are loud and cacophonous parts, but they are tame by NIN standards, they tend to be brief, and Reznor's pop sensibility keeps any one sound from overstaying its welcome.
However, as with most double albums released by popular musicians, the length is an obstacle. The thing is, all four volumes of Ghosts are fairly similar. Each volume has a couple soft piano bits, a bit of grinding guitar, some weird ambient noise, and so on. It makes it seem like the record is less varied than it really is. Different parts of the record offer different variations on certain basic ideas and tones, but if you listen to the whole thing in one go, it does call attention to Reznor's reuse of those tones. It is better to listen to each volume separately, as many reviewers have recommended. Within each volume, the tones tend to cycle, from loud to soft to in between, so it doesn't feel like any one component is dominant.
Also, in my view, the sludgy guitar tracks (I-8, II-10, III-23, IV-29) tend to be unremarkable. Reznor was never much for solos. With the exception of III-27, the most "solo-like" track, the guitar mostly just grinds out basic rhythms. In an instrumental album, without Reznor's newly powerful voice (and Year Zero featured his best vocals to date), this just isn't very interesting.
But fortunately, Reznor does much better with other tones. Ghosts features his best, most elegant piano compositions (I-1, II-13, III-22, IV-36). In I-1, the opening track, the piano is joined by a very soft, eerie synthesizer melody that really sets the "ghostly," slightly uneasy dreamlike mood suggested by the album title. In II-12, there is an effective switch from a similar piano melody to a strident mid-tempo rhythm played with increasingly loud feedback, an example of a Ghosts track with internal development.
A couple of songs complete the Aphex Twin connection. The queasy echoing sound in II-15 is very Aphex-like, and not too different from, say, 1:2 on Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2. Interestingly, the drums in this track and many others have a kind of rough "organic" sound (as opposed to, say, the very mechanical electronic sound of Year Zero). Then, II-17 uses a very Aphex-like echoing production for a simple guitar rhythm, and III-25 rounds things off with a "bubbling" mixture of odd ambient noises. Though, granted, queasy ambience has always appeared in Trent's music, for instance in "The Downward Spiral."
Occasionally there are tracks that don't quite fit into any of the main templates, like II-14, which is based on a shrill, vaguely martial faux-Eastern riff, or III-24, the most "techno-like" song, which brings in danceable beats and electronic bass in addition to the sludgy guitar. A couple of times, Reznor channels his inner Peter Hook and produces some satisfyingly deep bass riffs (I-5, II-18). Especially notable is the interplay between the bass and keyboards in II-18. In III-22, another introspective piano lead is off-set by the effective contrast of crashing drums and a jangly guitar counter-melody.
If I had to choose, I'd say that the second volume of Ghosts is the best and most varied overall, but the single best track on the album is IV-28. There is first a long stretch of tentative guitar strumming, which gradually mounts into a steady, rhythmic build-up, softened by gentle production. A similar technique is used in IV-34, with a piano break. If Aphex Twin were to release such a thing now, it would be hailed as a breath-taking return to form.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to rate this album on a five-point scale, since you can find tracks on it to fit any rating. The sheer volume of material means that you'll find stuff you enjoy and stuff you don't, and the very loose concept makes it a bit hard to tie all the tracks together and listen to the album as a coherent whole. But it is definitely very different from anything Nine Inch Nails have done before, and it firmly identifies Reznor as a singular musical voice, which perhaps we knew all along. "Industrial music," if that label still applies to NIN, has never had its boundaries pushed as far as on this album.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good, but...
Comment: Words can't describe just how cool Ghosts is. With its industrial sound and being the first NIN instrumental album, this should be a walk in the park, right? 'Fraid not since it sorta lacks in what NIN has done and it is sort of disappointing. Even so, the album is just too dang long (probably a stupid way to hate an album, but then again, I enjoyed the album not to care too much.) I recommend buying Ghosts if you are a hardcore NIN fan since new fans should never start off on Ghosts.
P.S Since when was this "New Age"? Dang amazon...
Customer Rating:
Summary: This is not the newest NIN album or the one you have heard....
Comment: Ghosts is a wide array of music, emphasis on music, as there are no vocals on this CD. It is great for background music but I rarely see myself using Trent and the band for elevator music. Only a couple of the songs are really memorable. While this is the most recent NIN disc available in stores, many assume it has some of the recent songs heard on the radio and internet on it, such as, Disipline, Echoplex and The Four of Us are Dying. These songs are all from NIN's newest album, The Slip. Unlike Ghosts I-IV, that album is loaded with full vocal tracks and the sort of dark, gritty songs that helped Reznor and NIN make their name. The confusion is generated because The Slip, while brand new, is only released via free download at the NIN Official Site.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An exploratory audioscape
Comment: After twenty years on the scene, the artist wants to come out with something experimental. For most bands this is a signal that they're out of ideas and are about to collapse into radio nostalgia on way-back-weekends.
Not Trent Reznor. The Ghosts are truly something very new on a long-known but previously underdeveloped foundation. Consider "A Warm Place" off Downward Spiral or the opening to "Something I could never have" off Pretty Hate Machine. These were reminders that beneath (and even coexisting with) the screams and mechanistic vicissitudes that define industrial music, Trent Reznor is a consummate musician.
"Ghosts" is fully a harmonic successor to the atmospheric movements on the very underappreciated "The Fragile". Consider the 1999 album's "La Mer" or "Pilgrimage" as opposed to "Where is Everybody?" or "The Wretched". Not to say that NIN isn't atmospheric, but rather that there are definitely tracks with an intentional message as opposed to tracks that are more meant for the listener to get lost in. Ghosts is clearly the latter.
This is not an album you'll "get" in one sitting. It would fail miserably if it were so simplistic. Let it grow on you as you meditate through it.
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