Dome / 2015 Pledge Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DUosQSJAxg
2016 Pledge Demo
Undated Demo (appears to be an edit of the earlier Pledge clips so likely 2016)
2016 Pledge Demo
Undated Demo (appears to be an edit of the earlier Pledge clips so likely 2016)
Album Version
Live 2017
Live with the Skaparis Orchestra 2018
Q - “What’s your favourite track on the album and why?”
A - “It’s a track called Mercy, it’s evil, it’s just so evil and so much fun.”
Richard Rogers interviews Ade Fenton for Music2Deal, 2017.
Trent Reznor has been recording music for over three decades and has released some of the most popular music in the industrial and alternative genres. ‘Closer’ and ‘Hurt’ remain in the collective public mindset, the latter albeit more for the Johnny Cash cover and Reznor’s ongoing project Nine Inch Nails have sold over twenty million records worldwide.
Throughout recording his 1989 debut ‘Pretty Hate Machine’, Reznor reportedly listened to ‘Telekon’ on a daily basis and Numan’s personal lyrical themes and focus on electronic elements would be a key inspiration for the project’s works.
Nine Inch Nails’ seminal work ‘The Downward Spiral’ drew from influences as diverse as David Bowie’s ‘Low’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’. This influence would run both ways; much of Bowie’s work in the nineties in turn drew from Reznor’s industrial leanings whether it was collaborator Reeves Gabrels running a vibrator over his guitar strings in an attempt to emulate ‘Pretty Hate Machine’s rough pop sounds in ‘Tin Machine II’ or ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’s liberal cribbing from ‘The Downward Spiral’s sonic palette. (Numan had initially quipped about the similarity in 1999; “just listen to Hearts Filthy Lesson, it’s like Nine Inch Nails with a Bowie vocal.”)
Bowie and Reznor toured together during the mid-nineties, with Reznor remixing Bowie’s singles ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ and ‘I’m Afraid Of Americans’ to great effect and appearing in the latter’s music video. Reznor gave Bowie credibility in the ‘outsider’ crowds he had spent much of the decade trying to re-establish himself in but their mutual respect and Reznor’s own talent and proficiency kept him out of his predecessor’s shadow.
Reznor would release a cover of Numan’s ‘Metal’ in 2000 and he later invited Numan to perform both it and ‘Cars’ during the former act’s ‘Wave Goodbye’ tour in 2009. This promise of retirement, like Bowie and Numan before him, proved to be temporary and Nine Inch Nails reconvened in 2013.
In turn, Numan drew inspiration from Reznor’s work with tracks like ‘My Jesus’ and ‘Pure’ plumbing similar lyrical content to ‘Heresy’ and ‘Closer’ and employing former Nine Inch Nails drummer Jerome Dillon for the ‘Jagged’ sessions.
Originally the title of the ‘We Are The Lost’ demo from 2006, ‘Mercy’ was reused for the ‘Savage’ album over a decade later, the new piece relaying the thoughts of one of the more unsavoury characters from the album’s narrative.
Aside from a shared title, ‘We Are The Lost’ and ‘Mercy’ share a similar crooning vocal style in the verses. However, where ’We Are The Lost’s subjects are ‘cold and blind / lost and afraid’, approaching as supplicants, victims of ‘vows that bind us here with you’, ‘Mercy’s narrator dismisses the thought with the phrase ‘mercy’s overrated’.
Nine Inch Nails’s influence is most apparent on the album in this track; the kick drum sounds almost identical to the bass drum from ‘Closer’ (itself sampled from Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’) and producer Ade Fenton spoke in a 2017 interview about capturing the sort of menace from Reznor cuts like ‘The Wretched’. Reznor’s track lies near the opening of 1999’s double album ‘The Fragile’, starting at the bottom of the downward spiral he’d spent the previous five years working his way towards. Every word is snarled out at the microphone, Reznor cursing his past delusions with the phrase “it didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to / it didn’t turn out the way you wanted it, did it?”
Numan’s vocal is colder, spoken from a position of power. The verses are a series of questions and answers, the narrator paces around the captive, throws out lines like, watches their impact (“I see / you understand now / nothing ever leaves here”) before delivering the final blow.
Where ‘The Lost’ was the collective pleadings from a gaggle of bound supplicants, ‘Mercy’ becomes a heel ground into a collective face, building on Reznor’s “Now you know / this is what it feels like” with the chorus of “No mercy”.
Steve Harris’s treated guitar lunges across in the choruses like a sawblade, the wildcard in the arrangement. Fenton described that he had Harris play “just the weirdest stuff … all of it ended up in the track”. ‘Mercy’ is a villainous monologue, the vocals and keyboards providing the calm exterior, the guitar revealing the narrator’s maniacal intentions.
Top: ‘U.S. Army and Air National Guard personnel participate in the combined arms demo during the South Carolina National Guard Air and Ground Expo at McEntire Joint National Guard Base, South Carolina, May 6, 2017.’
Picture is (surprisingly) public domain.
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