In Brief

** 1/2 Nine Inch Nails, “Broken,” Interscope. NiN auteur Trent Reznor is the man most likely to stretch the constraints of the industrial genre, but this fairly mundane six-song EP isn’t the opus likely to put NiN up there with GNR--guitars pound, beats whomp, sampled mechanical chaos is pumped loud enough to fairly demand that Midol be kept close at hand, but there is no song nearly so irresistible as 1989’s “Head Like a Hole.” Still, “Broken” should be good enough to hold you over until the real second album shows up in February.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).