I've been a huge fan of Gary's work for decades. I even have his autobiography personally autographed from him to myself, so you could say I'm passionate about his music. You could even possibly say he's my favorite singular musician of all time.
That said, I feel I should clarify that his newer stuff may seem NIN inspired, but he started creating his own industrial pop sound before Trent's band blew up. Gary was already experimenting with that type of music at least by
Metal Rhythm's time. If you listen to that album, you'll notice at times it sounds like
Pretty Hate Machine, except
PHM came out a year later. Gary really got deep into industrial around the time
Sacrifice came out. Well,
Sacrifice came out in 1994, the same year as
The Downward Spiral. Of course it was
Closer from
TDS that blew up NIN for the masses, so obviously Gary was already into that sound before that occurred as evidenced by
Sacrifice being released the same year.
Anyway, Numan has been on this industrial-darkwave kick for quite a long time. I mean, there's
Exile in 1997 now on to
Dead Son Rising in 2011. But I'll be honest, I'm tired of it. I mean, Gary used to do the Bowie thing and mix up his sound and persona with every album.* But ever since
Pure (admittedly a good album) sold well (relatively), Gary's been on that kick like a tunnel visioned train. I blame some of it on Ade Fenton, who's been his writing partner for a long time now. I think Ade is a super cool guy, don't get me wrong, but I wish he'd separate from Gary for a while... so that Numan would or could do something entirely different again. I feel like Ade is an enabler for this industrial-darkwave-rock sound Gary's been stuck on for so long.
Anyway, I know you didn't want to know all of that, but this is a subject of GREAT interest for me. I used to write industrial darkwave music myself, I was deeply involved with that scene. Hell I sold Trent Reznor some of my music software (which he personally asked me to keep developing when I retired from it). But after the release of my last
album, I was just done. I didn't sell it, I didn't promote, I didn't tour it, I just said the hell with it all. Done with industrial-darkwave, done with music in general. Music f*cking sucks these days, the industry is a pile of ass. [/rant]
*My all time favorite Numan albums actually start with Dance in 1981, up into Machine and Soul in 1992. The albums in those years were considered his worse critically, but I think they're all awesome and highly innovative and creative.
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