One Hell Of A Show
What a concert. I think the last time I saw Nine Inch Nails live was in Denver, Colorado back in 2001. No no, that’s too far back; I saw them again in KC a few years later. As always they put on a spectacular show, this time around featuring the uber-cool “stealth screens” (which you can see in the above photo suspended over the band). WIRED magazine did an article not so long ago about the ingenious use of these screens, which the band would interact with while on stage. There’s a video included with the article (here’s a YouTube hosted copy of that same video, in case the one on Wired’s website doesn’t work) that explains all the cool tricks they could do with this new setup so check it out. You might be interested to learn that the computer responsible for generating the visuals on stage (aka, “the brain”) runs Linux.
The opening act was an little known “experimental rock” band called Boris (although I thought the big orange sign behind them on stage said “Bong”).
Their music was… pretty damn annoying. If your favorite NIN CD of all time was Fixed (which itself was an experimental remix album based on Broken, an album Trent Reznor originally wrote because he was intentionally trying to destroy his career because he quickly grew to hate the legal/business sides of the music industry, and somehow ended up winning a Grammy for it) you might have been able to get into Boris. For the most part Kristin and I were just praying for them to finish up and get the hell off the stage. I know others in the arena got into them, and that’s perfectly fine. I actually could have given one of their songs a thumb up if it hadn’t lasted for 15+ minutes, ending with their goofy drummer standing on top of his trap set with his arms in the air like a D-bag before walking off stage without the rest of the band. And they kept playing the same drone for another 5 minutes after that. Rather than ridicule them as being horrible… I decided that their performance was simply funny. The drummer reminded me of Animal the Muppet.
Every time one of the band members yelled, “Whoooooooo!” into the microphone, I told Kristin to take a drink of her beer. That helped keep her smiling because otherwise it was like watching someone wince at the sound of children scratching a chalkboard with lawn rakes. I give them an A for effort.
After they were finished, and the rest of the fans arrived after the opening act, the show got off without a hitch and went on pretty flawlessly (so far as I could tell). You can read other reviews by fans who also attended this show by visiting the tour journal at the ETS forums, found here. There’s also a TON of videos from various shows on Youtube that you can look up and watch if you’ve got the time to spare. I’ve even uploaded a few to my Facebook profile.
There is one song (The Greater Good) that is rather dark and creepy… a lot of whispered lyrics. My girlfriend, being mostly unfamiliar with NIN, had trouble making out what he was saying. The lyrics were, “Breath us in…. slowly…. slowly.” She thought he was saying, “I breath my skin…. smelly…. smelly.” HILARIOUS! Every time she repeated what she thought the words were I about fell over from laughter.
One my favorite parts of the show was during the song Survivalism, which is off of the Year Zero album. Year Zero was a concept album which Trent wrote shortly after the re-election of George Bush in 2004. The premise behind the album was essentially what an album from about 15 years or so in the future might sound like if things in the government continued its streak of corruption. It had a heavy George Orwell/1984-ish theme about it (warrentless wiretapping, facism/totalitarianism, excessive censorship of information, etc.) It was quite fun to see the backdrop for this song being “security cameras” aimed at the fans while the song played. I especially liked the little touch in the lower right screen:
Overall I was very pleased with the show and would have felt it still worth the money if the opening act had not played. One last little note mentioned by Trent during the show: “For those of you who don’t know, you can download our latest album for free from our website. And you can download every other album that’s not free from everybody else’s website.”
Download “The Slip” from www.nin.com for free
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008