Trent Reznor has never really had a penchant for making happy music, but the Nine Inch Nails frontman hasn’t sounded sadder than when channeling his industrial broodiness into a new electronic band side project with his wife: How to Destroy Angels.

Fans who thought Reznor’s score for “The Social Network” soundtrack spiraled into doom-and-gloom despair are in for a similar experience: How to Destroy Angels’ debut record, “Welcome Oblivion,” is 13 tracks of cold, calculated meditations on life, the universe and everything in it.

“Welcome Oblivion” is a Reznor project through and through. From the glitchy handclaps and bleak industrial murmurings on the album’s opener, “The wake-up,” How To Destroy Angels settles into the same gloomy experimentations Nine Inch Nails famously dabbled in.

As a complete album, “Welcome Oblivion” really isn’t easy on the ears. Tracks like drum-heavy “Keep it together,” showcasing some dream-like vocals from Mariqueen Maandig, and the title track are densely produced, demanding rapt listener attention.

Reznor’s most obvious fault on “Welcome Oblivion” is watering down what should be a difficult album with a few throwaway pop songs. Piano-driven “How Long” features some soaring choruses from Maandig — and might feature the catchiest melody in Reznor’s catalog — but really has no place on this album.

The samegoes for puzzlingly folky “Ice Age,” which is cutesy and mostly acoustic, but lacks the well-planned electronic elements Reznor focuses on for the rest of the record.

But Nine Inch Nails’ flaw as a project was its cold, robotic tendencies. Reznor keeps How to Destroy Angels sounding resolutely human. That’s almost a stretch for an album that relies on drum machines and synthesizers as crutches, but “On the Wing” ditches the industrial fuzz for some reverb-soaked vocals dripping with nostalgia. The chirpy synths on “Strings and Attractors,” not to mention Maandig’s heartstring-tugging vocal performance, keep the song sounding far from emotionless.

His silly — if thought-provoking — pop songs aside, Reznor taps into some dark and damaged parts of his psyche. “Too late, all gone” shows off some ominous vocals and feedback-laden synthesizers, while “And the Sky Began to Scream” begs for dubstep remixes with its robotic instrumentals and haunting vocals.

The track listing flows seamlessly, each song building on the next with fervent – although hazy – electronics. In the last four songs on the record, Reznor puts on a clinic in buildup, starting with the album’s resident tearjerker, “We fade away.” It’s probably no accident the resonating synthesizer sounds eerily like a heart monitor fading out and the grim piano chords backing it create an unsettling atmosphere.

“We Fade Away” catapults into the schizophrenic “Recursive Self-improvement,” featuring a flurry of bleeps and bloops that sound just planned enough to be coherent. Its manic instrumentation subtly slides into “The loop closes,” the most Nine Inch Nails-y tune on the album. Like NIN fan favorite “The Hand That Feeds,” Reznor finally belts and seethes his lyrics, instead of fading them behind a muddled backdrop of synthesizers.

The album’s closer, “Hallowed Ground,” shimmers for seven minutes of distorted guitar and angelic piano before winding its way to a close. The song is the perfect metaphor for “Welcome Oblivion”: challenging to get through, but equally thought-provoking.

The mark of a good album is how much it makes you think when you listen to it.

The Beatles’ “White Album” wouldn’t be remembered as a classic if the Fab Four stuck “Love Me Do” on the record instead of “Revolution 9” because a good pop song does better on the charts. A good album isn’t marked by how many copies it sells or how many singles it spawns.

And if that’s the case, “Welcome Oblivion” is a fantastic album indeed.

Published on February 26, 2013 at 12:35 am

Contact Erik: ervanrhe@syr.edu | @therealvandyman