Zrow
I heard that NIN concerts were very, very cool. Anyone wish to confirm or describe?
I saw NIN touring in support of
The Fragile right after it came out, with A Perfect Circle opening - APC's album was not actually even in release yet, I think.
The NIN show was great; actually most of the songs were fairly straightforward renditions. However, NIN is a very studio-process-intensive effort (I mean, Trent recorded nearly all of
Pretty Hate Machine and
The Fragile by himself; and the bulk of the other albums as well, with varying amounts of studio assistance and collaboration). So just the act of translating a multi-tracked, layered creation into live-band setting puts a certain spin on everything.
Trent had a lot of stage presence and the visuals were cool; the band was backed by a giant video screen and not much else. The video flaicked around between professional video of the actual performance, feeds from some hand-held cameras distributed into the audience, and prerecorded clips of all kinds, from old newsreels to shot footage to abstract, moving colors like the cover of
The Fragile itself.
Actually, the
And All That Could Have Been DVD is an excellent documentation of the concert; it very much gives the impression of being there and it's well recorded.
INFERNO: NIN (and by Nine Inch Nails, I mean Trent Reznor and the handful of people he's working with at the moment) is by turns quiet and orchestral and extremely loud and aggressive. However, even at the most raucous and anger-filled, it's never thrashy. There's a strong focus on musicianship but even more focus on the craft of writing and recording music.
Trent is pretty much the dominant and only personality in the "band" (when it is a band, he does a lot of work alone), though he has frequent collaborating musicians as well. If you're looking for something like Metallica (to pick a name out of a hat), this is not it, because the songs are not usually traditional guitar-bass-drums arrangements, and the albums tend to be much more varied, flowing and themed rather than easily divided into discrete singles.
youd be blown away by some of trents good stuff then 👍
