Nine Inch Nails’ comeback exceeds expectations
K Nine Inch Nails at the Air Canada Centre Friday night
I’m not sure that anyone went into Nine Inch Nails’ Toronto comeback gig at the Air Canada Centre Friday night expecting something substandard because substandard is not something one has come to expect from the Nine Inch Nails brand. But I’m also pretty sure the show exceeded most everyone’s expectations. That’s no mean feat. Fashion might have flirted on and off with whatever Trent Reznor has gotten up to under the NIN alias since Pretty Hate Machine and the Downward Spiral cracked large as two of the fundamental pillars of the “alternative” explosion back in 1989 and 1994, respectively. But quality control, in the realms of both Reznor’s mostly solitary studio exploits and his periodic assaults on the touring circuit with whatever cabal of players he’s assembled as Nine Inch Nails at a given moment, has never been a problem. The records have been consistently good and consistently one subtle step ahead of wherever NIN was before, the live shows unflaggingly intense and technologically dazzling. Even before the excellent new Nails LP, Hesitation Marks, obliterated most doubts about Reznor’s ability to resurrect NIN in a contemporary form befitting its legacy last month, in fact, he’d already put out one very good album this year, Welcome Oblivion, as a passive member of How to Destroy Angels, a band formed with wife Mariqueen Mandig and Atticus Ross. That said, though, the seven-person touring lineup recently convened for Nine Inch Nails’ fall “Tension 2013” tour is arguably one of the best Reznor’s ever had. It’s one thing that NIN’s increasing- ly brawny bandleader can, at 48, still conjure enough of the battering-ram angst he felt at “26 years on my way to hell” to rally an arena’s worth of increasingly long in the tooth ’90s teenagers to raise their fists and boisterously carry the refrains to such still-searing standards as “Terrible Lie,” “March of the Pigs,” “Wish,” “The Hand That Feeds” and, of course, “Head Like a Hole” (a.k.a. the “other” “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) like they still wanted to burn their parents’ houses down in anger. It’s quite another that he’s doing it while fronting a more or less entirely new band that feels more nimble and properly band-like than any he’s fronted in the past.
The slippery techno thrust of new cuts like “Copy of A” and “Disappointed” aside, Friday’s set often posited Nine Inch Nails less as an electronically charged industrialrock act than as a ferociously noisy punk band that somehow wound up in command of a titanic sound system and a high-end LED/lighting rig that, by the time the weepy/angsty ballad “Hurt” rolled around to close out the night, was probably visible with the naked eye from Jupiter.
A versatile punk band, though, one that was able to flit easily between the pummelling punishment of “Survivalism,” or the hair-raisingly heavy “Somewhat Damaged” and the insistent electro-funk of “All Time Low” and the storming new single “Came Back Haunted” — one of several tunes cast in a new light thanks to the addition of soulful backup vocals by Lisa Fischer and Sharlotte Gibson.
Fans were even treated to the unexpected spectacle of Nine Inch Nails indulging in a bit of freaky jazzbo jamming towards the end of “While I’m Still Here.”
Keep the surprises coming, I say. Nearly 25 years on, there are no flies on Nine Inch Nails. None at all.