Still a Pretty Hate Machine After All These Years

For 17 years Trent Reznor has been expressing alienation, isolation, anger from social injustice and conformity in song and sound. Last night, his Nine Inch Nails showed that after all those years, platinum albums and Grammys, he still knows how to find that place of hurt and madness and take an audience there for a couple hours.

NIN fired salvo after salvo of high-grade industrial metal to a large and appreciative crowd at Alltel Arena in North Little Rock. The band alternated the frenetic pace and noise with quiet moments and ballads of soul-crushing pain. And Reznor was a man of few words, just an occasional "thank you."

From an opening of songs from Reznor's most recent release "With Teeth," ("Love Is Not Enough" and "You Know What You Are?") he dipped into the catalog for the hypnotic and crashing "Terrible Lie" from 1989's "Pretty Hate Machine." Throughout the night, the guitarists and keyboardist created a literal Wall of Noise puntuated by the drummer, who was playing his ass off (I thought his hands would fly off). Reznor, looking bigger but buff with his black hair buzzed tight, still managed to muster the intensity after all these years - jumping around, strumming the guitar and letting out his Viking yawp.

During the more intense songs, the light rigging above the band lowered to a point seemingly just over the band's heads...making for a more confined space to rage against.

The band went from the thrash "March of the Pigs" to a personal favorite, the ballad "Something I Can Never Have." Reznor's voice seeming to bleed over lines like "gray would be the color/if I had a heart."

A middle section of the show saw the curtain come back down and the band perform three songs while weird and sometimes disturbing images were projected onto the cloth. Ballad "Right Where It Belongs" was set against scenes of anonymous and conforming subdivisions and happy families mixed with images of gruesome death, war and destruction. "What if all the world you think you know is an elaborate dream...and if you look at your reflection/is that all you want to be?/what if you could look right through the cracks/would you find yourself afraid to see?"

The dynamics of the set list were again evident as the mournful "Hurt" (famously covered a couple years back by Johnny Cash) started with Reznor alone on stage with a keyboard. It was a little strange to hear a song of such lonliness and despair become an arena rock singalong, but the delivery by the band remained effective.

From there the band hit another inudstrial thrash nugget, "Wish" before launching finishing with "Only," "Every Day is Exactly the Same," the seemingly anti-Iraq war "The Hand That Feeds" ("What if this whole crusade's a charade...") and closing right where they belonged, with the song that put NIN on the map, "Head Like a Hole."

For a NIN fan, it was a satisfying show (though I would've loved to see the never-done-live "Perfect Drug"). For the uninitiated, the crowd seemed to groove and gyrate like it was 1994 - the probable peak of NIN's mainstream popularity with the release "The Downward Spiral." Perhaps it was out of tune with today's hip-hop pop world, but I don't think Trent's letting it bring him down.