The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails, probably my favorite album of all time (at least at the moment), got a 2.0 from pitchfork in a frankly hilarious review written by Brent DiCrecenzo, who also did the Kid A review (aka the most pretentious piece of media criticism I have ever read in my life and I say that as someone who adores that album). The entire review consists of him whining about the most surface level, lowest hanging fruit criticisms you could muster, nitpicking the lyrics as edgy and juvenile, blowing off the most interesting parts of the album in favor of condescendingly writing the entire thing off as fodder for angsty teenagers after about two reluctant listens. The moment you start the review it’s obvious that his mind was made up long before he actually heard a single second of it, and this is confirmed as the review is told in an out of order, confusing narrative chronicling his experience whining about how he doesn’t want to listen to this juvenile garbage in his Honda Accord on the way home from getting his tie dry cleaned, with the first chronological portion of the review being him calling up a buddy to read lyrics aloud directly from the liner notes before even hearing any of the actual album. It’s a review written by someone who clearly thinks themselves above the music in question from the beginning, who maybe heard the album twice, jotted down the most obvious bits, barely noticed the best track on the entire album on his second listen and wrote it off as “gentle piano plunking”, and was unwilling to give it even a moment more of his time than he had to. The Fragile is admittedly an album that not everyone is going to get the most out of because it’s the singular album I’ve heard that has requested the most out of me as a listener. It took me around five listens to even begin to realize why so many Nine Inch Nails fans laud it as Trent Reznor’s best work, and several more before I was calling it my favorite album ever. To get the most out of it means taking the time to realize how about half the tracks share a lyric or motif in common with another song in the album, piecing together the story through repeat listens and analysis of the lyrics, including some in French in a spoken word segment, that when translated, calls back to recurring ideas from their previous album, the Downward Spiral. Once you get to this point, you start to become invested in the album, and start seeking out tracks that didn’t make the cut of the cd version, only being hinted at in the outros of a couple tracks, but nonetheless appeared on the vinyl and help give an even more complete vision of the narrative that is unfolding. You start to look at releases like Still, a compilation album that was released as a bonus disc with certain versions of their 2002 live album, And All That Could Have Been. That release consists of four stripped down versions of tracks from Pretty Hate Machine, the Downward Spiral, and the Fragile that end up in some cases being better than the originals, and it also includes several instrumental tracks cut from the Fragile, along with And All That Could Have Been (the song), a The Cure-esque ballad that didn’t fit into the Fragile but is nonetheless in my opinion the best song in their entire discography. Still is extremely underrated and serves as a fantastic epilogue of sorts to the Fragile, but it’s something you won’t get the same enjoyment out of unless you’ve put time into getting the most out of the Fragile as well. This isn’t even to mention the fully instrumental, two and a half hour Deviations 1 version of the Fragile released exclusively on vinyl in 2017, which is an expanded version of the album featuring instrumental versions and alternate takes of songs from the fragile, including around 14 completely new songs that provide additional connective tissue to even further develop the atmosphere, story, and pacing of the album. While it’s true that these additional releases and cut content do not themselves alter the quality of the album, as it should be something that stands alone, it’s demonstrative of the fact that the Fragile, more than almost any other album I know, is an album that you get out of what you put into it. If you’re only going to listen to it a couple times to rush to get a review out while blowing it off as beneath you, then you’re going to see it as a bloated, disjointed, juvenile mess of an album. But if you put in the time it will continue to grow on you more with each listen, as you piece together all the secrets it holds within its 104 minute runtime and the ones hidden in bootlegs and compilation albums that give the complete picture. This makes it all the more unsurprising that when it was given a re-release in 2017, Pitchfork gave it a much more fitting score of 8.7, lauding it as Trent Reznor’s magnum opus and opening the review with comparisons to Pink Floyd’s the Wall. The original review is something Pitchfork seems eager for people to forget, as on the 20th anniversary of the album, they tweeted in celebration and asked readers to revisit their review of the album, linking only the review of the definitive edition, rather than the embarrassing, pretentious scrawl of the original 2.0/10 review. I wonder why that could be.