I’ve gone over this before; the remastered Pretty Hate Machine is nice, if a little underwhelming after the special edition of The Downward Spiral. The lack of any special content aside from NIN’s cover of “Get Down Make Love” (previously available on the “Sin” single) is a little disappointing, but would be fine if the new mix were a clear improvement. The problem is that although its tracks are a little clearer than before, perhaps EQed a little better, the 2010 album comes from the twenty-first century school of mastering — which is to say, “louder is better“. Everything is compressed to the upper registers, so we lose all of the old dynamic range and the vocal tracks are now often overwhelmed by the backing.

This is unfortunate, and you’d think that Trent Reznor would know better, but it’s sort of a fact of modern studio engineering. Whatever. What I’m noticing, which I have noticed before but I’m noticing again now, is the peculiar effect of this new mastering — which is to say, the better tracks get noisy and hard to listen to, but the weaker tracks — some of them runners up for Trent Reznor’s worst ever — come out much improved. And the damnedest thing is that it’s hard for me to narrow down why.

“The Only Time” should by all reasonable extremes be the worst song on the album — except its misjudged weirdness elevates it beyond “That’s What I Get”. Now? I… kind of like it. It’s certainly easier on the ears than most of the album, and now its weirdness has a certain charm that it lacked. Again, I don’t know what’s different aside from the compressed dynamic range. It’s hard to do an A/B comparison. It’s still a stupid song, but it has become enjoyably dumb.

“That’s What I Get” will forever be Reznor’s most pointless album track, but again it lives a little more than before — as does “Ringfinger”, which to my ear will always be a limp reworking of his perhaps too-saucy-for-1989 “Twist”.

I have always thought that the mixes on Pretty Hate Machine were the most anemic of all known versions of those songs. The single mix of “Sin” is so much richer, so much better in every way — as are most of the early mixes of “Down In It”, “Sanctified”, and the joyously vague “Kinda I Want To”, which in a discussion with our Amandeep Jutla I once paraphrased as “I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!” In order to make all of this material sit together and sound sufficiently gloomy, someone knocked off most of the individual edges.

This may in part explain why I’m not too bothered by the new master. The songs that it degrades mostly sound better elsewhere, and the songs that it improves have never sounded so good.

Also, the packaging.