Nine Inch Nails

Even if I’ve never been all that interested in the records that came after The Downward Spiral, a Nine Inch Nails show is always an event, so I had been keeping an eye on tickets for this one. By the day of the show, even the available cheap seats were not quite cheap enough for this cheapskate, but at the eleventh hour, a friend materialized with an extra ticket, and I came to my senses. And congratulations are in order, because of course it was incredible.

The set was broken into four parts, alternating between the more rock-oriented main stage at the end of the floor and a more electronic-oriented mini stage (maybe about the size of a pro wrestling ring) in the middle of the floor. The mini stage kicked off the show with Trent playing a few unplugged tunes at a piano; he was later joined on that stage by Boys Noize, the DJ who had opened the show. When that stage receded into the floor for the second and final time, it let loose enough fog to make it look like a smoking crater, as if to definitively say we’re done here.

Earlier, as the band segued to the main stage for the first time, the drummer (Josh Freese, recently swapped by Foo Fighters for NIN’s Ilan Rubin) was projected on all three sides of the curtain concealing that stage, before it was raised to reveal a system of sheer scrims the band could be seen through. Those scrims all displayed various abstract projections throughout the performance, and in tandem with the lights and woven with a roving camerman’s live footage, the effect was astonishing, especially during “Reptile” and “Copy of A.” It might be the coolest stage production I’ve ever seen. The main-stage finale that closed the show was comparatively underwhelming, but only because the scrims had been removed, turning it into a more traditional rock show.

Half of the 20-song set list was devoted to the first three records, with six tracks from The Downward Spiral alone. The other half sampled a track each from pretty much everything else, including the Natural Born Killers and Lost Highway soundtracks. Towards the end, as Trent was introducing the band, I was wondering what hits were even left for the big finish, but I was so caught up in the spectacle that I hadn’t noticed the conspicuous absence of “Head Like a Hole” and “Hurt,” which of course brought the house down.

Minimal stage banter. No encore. Perfect.