I just listened to it for the first time last night, and I really love it. I think Trent Reznor is even better doing instrumental work, he is such an amazing musician. Sometimes his vocals/lyrics become too angry and depressing for my tastes. But man, the music is just beautiful.
Well my favorite album of his is The Fragile, a true masterpiece.. but the 2 albums after that were kind of dark and angry for my tastes, unless of course I'm in a dark and angry mood.. then it hits the spot. But yeah, I love his music, he is a genius.
I loved the way he went about releasing it online partially for free and a cheap ($5) full version. Trent has also started a group on youtube for fans to make videos to the songs on ghosts: https://www.youtube.com/group/ninghosts I do like the direction he's going in now without the constraints of a record label and the album(s?) has some great moments on it. But in my opinion (I'm a HUGE Nine Inch Nails fan by the way.) a lot of the album is just too disjointed trying to go in every direction at once. In many of the songs, just as I'm getting into them, they end abruptly, others just seem to be going nowhere from the start and drag on. I know that it's supposed to be an experimental album based on the band (there is one this time!) imagining places in their minds and making music to it, But I kind of see it more as a stepping stone to a different sound in the future for nin. Given all of that, I still do like this album a lot since the songs that are good are some of the best they've ever done (1,9,12,13,22,28,32,34,36) and that in and of itself could be a whole album. It's just that it seems a little bloated at times...to me anyway, but hey, for five bucks I'm not complaining!
i love NIN, or as i frequently call them (for political reasons) "Twenty Two point Eight Six Centimetre Nails" and, the Ghosts I-IV album is actually quite good in my opinion. some of the songs are quite slow, quite repetitive, but then you can only be disappointed if you have an expectation, and when Trent said they were just experimenting with whatever came to mind, then what do you expect? eh? the slower songs are good, some are somewhat relaxing and then there's ones with the excellent drum work that is just perfect for driving to work with yeah?