To call Nine Inch Nails the best rock band on the arena circuit seems, if not wrong, then at least unlikely. Trent Reznor doesn’t really have the arty pretensions that most alt.rock frontmen do (Thom Yorke, even at his most abject, would never sing a line as self-negating as “I wear this crown of shit”). When drum ‘n’ bass’ skittering drums were all the rage back in the mid-'90s, NIN drew on lumbering industrial and ‘80s club sounds that had gone out of date years before. That despite their non-trendiness they became one of rock’s most popular acts proves beyond any doubt that sheer will to power can make you a star, and watching Reznor prance about a stage as the most cocksure man on the planet while begging you to blow his brains out is to watch someone fully willing himself into being.
After a droningly noisy but upbeat and almost sunny set from Deerhunter, with frontman Bradford Cox coming off almost polite in between bursts of garage-meets-shoegaze squall, NIN laid waste to the crowd. The five-piece touring outfit started with an astonishingly propulsive “1,000,000,” easily the best song from their new album The Slip (which itself is easily their best since The Downward Spiral, I crown-of-shit-you-not.) The stage setup was minimal at first — a few strobes, a few overhead lights, some dry ice — leading you to wonder what all the fuss in other markets was about.
But Reznor’s personality was enough to fill an arena. He was a testosterone-jacked superhero version of a rock star in red shirt, black pants and cropped hair, hanging off the mic stand with both hands like a bodybuilder doing rows, while longtime axeman Robin Finck bent over his guitar and let his braids fall in his face as he unspooled torrents of noisy solos and hot power chord blasts. Moving quickly through thrilling renditions of more new cuts (“Letting You,” “Discipline”), the audience stood respectfully but never quite warmed to the newer material. Despite being 14 years old, “March of The Pigs” isn’t that different in tone from most of The Slip, but the difference in the crowd’s reaction couldn’t be more pronounced — they went gloriously, fist-pumpingly crazy.
The band peppered the mix of songs from the last three albums (“Head Down,” “Survivalism”) with catalog classics (“Closer,” “Terrible Lie,” “Wish”), but instead of just rolling out a standard rock show, the set was designed in an arc. As they moved into more introspective territory, the visuals got more impressive: “March” had enough strobes to make it an epileptic’s nightmare; “Vessel” saw projected red and black sunspot bursts behind Reznor; and by the time they reached a mini-set from the recent and all-instrumental Ghosts I-IV, the stage had transformed into a diorama made out of glowing semi-porous video screens that you could sometimes see through, when they weren’t being obscured by breathtaking nature scenes or scads of black-and-white static.
For all the effects, impressive as they were, the lengthier Ghosts numbers were the low point of the show — though for someone who loves Pink Floyd as much as Reznor has professed to, the occasional wanky instrumental is probably par for the course. And of course, they bounced back with more classic material, performing “Piggy” as the screen turned into a lumpy blue landscape that suited the song’s melancholy better than some high-res projection would have. (Kanye West, eat your heart out.)
The arc completed itself as they rocketed towards the end of the set proper, with the tech toys retreating into the ceiling and returning them to their basic stage setup for a “Head Like a Hole” that shook the venue until the screens merely showed the NIN logo. The band soon came back, and after a mind-boggling version of The Slip’s “Echoplex”that began and ended with Reznor seemingly playing a drum machine by touching buttons appearing on the screens, they set the controls for the NIN fanbase’s black, frigid hearts.
It would be easy to condescend towards Nine Inch Nails devotees. I’ve caught myself doing it, staring with mild bemusement at their pale-faced fans, wondering what lies behind their piercings and perpetually wounded expressions, not to mention their empathy towards Trent Reznor’s narcissism. NIN lovers wear their scars on their sleeves and make trophies of them, which in the calculus of high-school popularity I used to find embarrassing.
But like any worthwhile cult, their longevity is bred in the fact that they take care of each other, something that was evident in seeing them sing out the comically self-abnegating lyrics to “Hurt” as though it was the national anthem. (NIN could have ended with it, instead of coming back for an anemic “In This Twilight.”) These people are not Deadheads; their love of NIN didn’t make them quit their jobs and become a vast network of losers roaming the country for decades on end. But unlikely singalongs like “Hurt” did get them through high-school, and anyone trying to figure out the band’s enduring and pan-generational popularity only has to look to that song, an object lesson in how to wallow in self-loathing while simultaneously drawing strength from their anger. Considered outside the panopticon of teenage coolness, it’s actually kinda moving. Remember that the next time one of them gives you the death stare from across the food court.