Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Oh Fuck Yeah

Channel Z are posting bits of the new Perfect Circle album online, complete with commentary by Maynard. Currently there are two songs there, (I think they're going to put up a new one every day or something).

The first track is about 30 seconds of a cover of 'What's going on' by Marvin Gaye. It's OK. Very mellow and laid back.

The second is 'Passive', which Maynard confirms is a reworking of an old Tapeworm song (probably 'Vacant'). This alone is great news, and I'll tell you why. Tapeworm was a side project of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, supposedly allowing him to collaborate with other musicians, in a way that his control freak tendancies wouldn't allow him to do with NIN.

Tapeworm consisted basically of the NIN live band to start with, and they got a bunch of guest vocalists in (Maynard and Phil Anselmo from Pantera among them, if I recall correctly).

Now as any NIN fan knows, Trent can't put out an album until enough time has passed since the last one that he's run out of money, his fans have forgotten about him, and his record label is shitty with him. Only after these conditions are met will he be depressed enough to start writing good music again. So not much happened with Tapeworm for many years, other than that Trent would emerge every now and again and say 'It'll be out in a year or so.'

The rest of the band got bored and went off to do other things, so Tapeworm ended up being Trent, Maynard and Atticus Ross from 12 Rounds. At the beginning of the year, it looked like the album might be out soon. Every week or so Trent would post a picture to nin.com of the three of them working in the studio, or a blurred out tracklisting, or Trents dog. A Perfect Circle even played one of the songs (Vacant) live, even though it made Trent mad.

Then a few months ago, out of nowhere, Trent announced that Tapeworm was over, and that the material would never be released. (So much for the collaborative idea). Apparently there were too many legal hassles, although Trent says "if the music had been great, all of this probably could have been worked out".

Well, it's very sad that after literally years and years of rumours and teasers, the whole thing got shitcanned, but fortunately you can hear one song off it if you follow the title link. And it's fucking awesome, so do it.

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