I am the angel of your destruction

Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral [Deluxe Edition]

Yeah, I already own the ordinary version of this album, and I don't have a surround setup, so I don't get anything out of the 5.1 mix on the album. And my ears are too fucked to tell the difference between SACD format and regular CD format, so that does nothing for me either.

So why did I buy it? Two reasons - the first of which is really dorky. While my original Downward Spiral was left behind when almost my entire CD collection was stolen a few years ago, they still took the album case, and I really liked the artwork that came with it. Lots of rust brown backgrounds with random objects strewn across it. It's abstract but very evocative, and it complements the mood of the album perfectly.

On it's own that's a pretty geeky reason to spend a lot of money on an album I already have, so fortunately it comes with a bonus b-sides disc. There's a lot of filler on the disc, a couple of tracks from the remix album 'Further down the spiral', which I already have. A "quiet" version of 'Hurt' which sounds almost identical to the main version. And a bunch of demo versions of other songs, which are mildly interesting in that they show a bit of how the songs developed, but aren't worth listening to more than once. Having said that there's some damn good stuff on there too. 'Burn' from the 'Natural born killers' soundtrack is an excellent song (apparently they've been playing it live recently). A pair of covers, 'Memorabilia' (originally by Soft Cell) and 'Dead souls' (Joy Division) are great tracks that I've wanted to own for a while. And last but not least there's the Coil remix of 'Closer'. A great bunch of tracks that I would never have bought while they were scattered over half a dozen singles, but am happy to pay for on one disc.