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I've never listened to albums as a coherent whole except for my very favorites. It's just too much to expect every song to be good. If people customarily listen to the entire album, I believe it means they have a lack in taste.
It's not meant to be "real songs", as NIN has been making real songs for decades now, and they obviously wanted to try something different, unbound by the record labels. To me, the lack of "real songs" is made up by the volume of material.
Favorite tracks so far:
3 (tribal beats with NIN industrial flavor)
19 (here it starts to get more industrial)
24 (my favorite one in general)
26 (this one could be a "real" song if it had lyrics)
27 (this one also)
the rest of Ghost IV is hard enough not to make me fall asleep.
It is dark ambient, which is what it is meant to be. I find it good for writing to. It's must more downbeat than the far harder music I actually like listening to regularly, i.e., gabba or metal...
I never thought Reznor's voice was so amazing anyway, so this instrumental suits me fine.
We obviously share a common appreciation of music, as all of the tracks you've listed as favorites are the ones that earned five-star markings in my media player as well! I tend to listen to a lot of dark ambient music, including amorphous, almost featureless "depression ambience" works like Wilt's Radio 1940--which is literally two CDs of droning static and gently-mutilated radio broadcasts. I like that kind of music specifically because it makes for such great background noise: I can't even count the number of stories and/or monographs I've written to ambient soundtracks over the years.
On further thought, the reason I find Ghosts I-IV to be a little dull is that it doesn't always disappear into the background. Some of the higher-BPM, harder tracks obtrude upon my mind, but they don't bring with them any solid grooves or interesting sample-play or even lyrics...which is why they feel "half-baked" to me: they're too strong to be entirely ambient, yet still too minimal and, well, ghostly to be rockin' jams. They exist in the album cover's strange, blurry grey space of indecisiveness.
That could be either and good thing or a bad thing, depending on tastes. I really don't find it to be either: I just find it a little tedious after, say, listening to eighteen tracks in a row.
Speaking of harder music, if you've never listened to a group called Downliners Sekt,definitely check them out. Their music is an exquisite combination of soft ambient sounds and slammin', gangsta-industrial beats that scratch and scrape and skip like the world's most wounded CD--yet are still regular enough, and melodic enough, to get your head bobbing along. In a way, you might think of them as what Ghosts I-IV could've been had Trent placed a little more emphasis on beats and thrown some chopped-up vocal samples into the mix to catch the listener's ear.
Whenever I hear any track from these albums, I die a little inside. No beat, no rhythms, just a load of ambient drivel. I can imagine NIN sitting back and laughing at all of us for downloading such shit. I'll never attend a show if they play these tracks! I don't mean to be so harsh, but come on people, wake up. I can make music like this. It takes an expensive keyboard and some studio time. You play three different chords for 5 minutes. Trent is definantly a genius, but these albums are ****** ridiculous.