Nine Inch Nails back on tour

Several years ago, I went to a Nine Inch Nails gig in Stockholm. Two years later I stood alone in the rain, surrounded by thousands, while Trent teared away at his equipment.

After that Wave Goodbye tour, Trent Reznor called it a quit. But recently he decided to resurrect the whole thing and released a record. This past weekend I went to another Nine Inch Nails concert in Stockholm and I thought it couldn’t possible top those previous ones? Well, yes and no.

The setlist was incredible. First half of the concert roughly consisted of old favorite songs and the crowd felt as amazed as I did. Then it got a bit tedious with the new songs in the middle and Trent declared that he had been in a bad mood for several days. But it all took off again and the last third of the show contained the suspected crowd-pleasers.

Highlights included a totally mind-blowing version of Eraser, a somewhat surprising appearance of The Great Destroyer (including the only talk of the evening) and the banana-crazy percussion on March of the Pigs.

Into the void.

I read somewhere that Nine Inch Nails rehearsed 50 songs for this tour, to make each set unpredictable. And they really nailed it. I only counted one bad song (Find my way), the rest was pretty epic. Trent even had the guts to cut half the band during mid-tour, including renowned bass player Pino Palladino. Fortunately Robin Finck covered the flank as usual. The lightning and projected backdrops were simple yet suggestive, as expected.

However, this time around I watched the thing from a greater distance than past times, which might explain why I don’t rank this concert higher despite the awesome setlist. It is not And all that could have been, but it never will.

Everybody really ought to visit the gig in Copenhagen tomorrow. Who knows what shiny treasures might be uncovered?