Nine Inch Nails are not a live band. They're not even really a band exactly, as their studio albums feature only mastermind Trent Reznor and the occasional guest, crafting a sound that is not always easy to reproduce in a live setting. The best place to hear Nine Inch Nails is still on record, but at the Joint on April 30, Reznor and his latest backing band proved they are certainly capable of delivering a strong live performance.
Barely saying a word to the audience (not even "thank you" until after the ninth song), Reznor took the stage with a single-minded ferocity, backed by his capable and tight new band. Guitarist Aaron North, in particular, displayed manic energy, thrashing around on stage, spinning his guitar and jamming it into amplifiers on the heavier songs. The audience was nearly as enthusiastic (the girl in front of me started crying during "With Teeth," the title track to NIN's new album), making for an involving and symbiotic concert experience.
The set list included most of the band's biggest hits, with "Closer," their most famous song, coming early in the show, and an excellent closing trifecta of the haunting ballad "Hurt" (recently reinvigorated by Johnny Cash), new single "The Hand that Feeds" and the band's first hit, "Head Like a Hole." Playing a 95-minute set with no encore, they also played five songs from With Teeth, in stores May 3, but the biggest response was to material from their massive 1994 album, The Downward Spiral.
On record, NIN's songs are often cold and multi-layered, and in the live setting, they took on a greater urgency, while occasionally losing some of their nuance. While synth-driven tunes like "Terrible Lie" and "Reptile" sounded even better punched up with the full band, others, including "The Big Come Down" and "Even Deeper," sounded muddy without studio precision.
For a band that exists mainly as a studio creation, NIN put on a lively and energetic show, the crunching guitars and live drums giving their studio-crafted sound an urgency that it doesn't always have on record.