Trent Reznor sure has come a long way.In the 19 years since releasing his debut, Pretty Hate Machine, the frontman and mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails has traded in his shoulder-length goth-hair and pale, wispy frame for a more streamlined look, complete with shorn locks and a considerably more muscular physique.
Perhaps this newfound fitness has contributed to his recently prolific output, dropping three full albums and a double-disc set of instrumentals onto our collective lap in the past four years, a veritable landslide of work from a man who managed but one song during a similar stretch in the '90s.
His stamina was certainly in evidence Friday night as the Lights in the Sky tour rolled into Hamilton on the back of The Slip, their latest album. Surprisingly, it's still available as a free download from the band’s website (nin.com).
Opening the show was Boris, a little-known quartet from Japan that swayed between heavy dirge metal, swooping atmospherics, and buzzsaw punk to a less than capacity crowd, owing more to the 7:15 start-time than an aversion to the band itself. By the time the headliners took the stage, though, Copps Coliseum was packed and pandemonium was in the air.
Out of the gate with a furious rendition of 1,000,000, and a bouncy Discipline, NIN was already showcasing both their intensity and a painstakingly synchronized lightshow, but the rambunctious crowd was in need of familiarity, and once the opening blips of Closer registered, the building positively erupted.
The roar, however, almost immediately gave way to awe, as a spectacular, three-tiered screen system was revealed as the latest in the envelope-pushing band’s bag of tricks.
A massive LCD screen sat at the back of the stage as a visual anchor to the flexing, mobile chain-link fences that hung ominously above, and once those seemingly see-through screens became opaque with pulsing lava, and once the blood-red floodlights engulfed the audience, it became apparent that it was Reznor’s face pushing through the ooze, morphing into a distorted, fisheye-lens image of teeth gnawing through the band’s biggest hit.
With these moveable screens, the show all at once became multi-dimensional; a handful of instrumental tracks became sojourns through rippled sand-dunes shielded by a cloudy sky, into a forest of layered branches hovering over gently shifting water, and under tendrils of smoke twirled against a backdrop of fog.
Survivalism featured an eight-monitor bank of security-cameras that included hilariously distracting pre-taped footage, and a cage of bad-channel television snow encased the stage for Only, an effect only negated when Reznor touched the screen, shoveling shards of black-and-white to the side with a wave of his hand, creating an effect not unlike a man attempting to escape a snow-globe.
Easy to overlook in the saturation of spectacular visuals was the sound quality of the show itself, and the band has never sounded crisper or more pulverizing. The return of longtime guitarist Robin Finck to the fold was a welcome addition, as was the somewhat unexpected inclusion of former Beck bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen.
Big-beat, power-chord favourites Wish and Head Like a Hole were stripped to captivate sonically, utilizing only wide-washing, scattershot lights to bathe the audience, allowing the euphoric echo of a stadium full of people singing in unison to be seen as well as heard.
The frantic sing-along to Hurt belied not only the harrowing rock-cliché of flicked Bics, but also the overriding spectacle of the event: there is delight to be had in listening to a band this good make difficult, challenging music when it suits the mood, and a perverse pleasure in watching the latest technological advancements being used to simulate broken machinery.
Trent Reznor has come a long way, and after almost two decades it’s amazing that it’s this performance he’ll be hard-pressed to top.
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