Some things cannot be unseen. Some images burn into your brain so strongly they never go away, like staring at the sun for more than a millisecond. But in this case, instead of little spots all over your vision, there’s a fly-like creature, some weird piggish face and Trent Reznor shakily yelling at you.
That about sums up the music video for the new Nine Inch Nails song, “Came Back Haunted,” the first single off the Reznor-fronted group’s first album in five years.
How freaky and surreal is the video? Well, before getting into the fact it comes with a STERN WARNING THAT IT HAS BEEN KNOWN TO CAUSE SEIZURES one must take into account it was directed by David Lynch, the man responsible for Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. Need I go on?
The clip is four minutes and 17 seconds worth of visual assault on the senses, with a mass of red, white, gray and black shapes, splotches and flashes, all to the tune of the catchy, up-tempo electronic track that harkens back to some of NIN’s early stuff from the early and mid-1990s. You know, back when NIN videos included images like a machine-assisted beating heart and a snuff film with self-mutilation.
Ah, the good old days.
The video also can give you an idea of what it will be like to see NIN on its upcoming world tour, which starts with festival appearances in the U.S., Europe and Asia before hitting a couple dozen cities in America. That includes a Nov. 9 stop in Phoenix, where my floor seats (or spots to stand and mosh) have already been secured.
NIN shows have always been just as much about the visuals as the way Reznor and his touring band can convert computer-made music into live sound. His most recent side project, How to Destroy Angels, included his wife as lead singer and had one band member solely devoted to projecting pictures, shapes, light and other weird things on a screen behind them and on columns of translucent surgical tubing in front. Trust me, it was cool.
Now, I know you’ll all click on the video below to see if I’m just being outlandish and overreactive (what I like to call Glenn-Beck-ish), but remember, you were warned. Also, if you’re rendered comatose (or worse), I call dibs on your watch.
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2013.
This is dreadful. Let’s forget for a moment that the video isn’t very good. Why is it that its main selling point is that it might trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy? Does that make NIN appear somehow cooler? It’s all very well that the video carries a warning, but how much use is that if you don’t know you have photosensitive epilepsy? In 1997 an episode of Pokemon was shown in Japan that triggered seizures in over 600 people. 76 per cent of them had no history of epilepsy. And what happens to people who have their first seizure as a result of this video? They’ll lose their driving licence and, where they need a licence to make a living, they’ll potentially lose their jobs. Yeah, that’s really cool. Well done NIN.
And David Mendez was complaining about KGUN’s uninteresting and useless Fry-Day “gimmic”? I didn’t even know that people even watched videos anymore since MTV stopped showing them…lol