Nine Inch Nails, Manchester NH

[music | Einstürzende Neubauten - Selbstportrait mit Kater]

I'm way behind on uploading photos for shows, like everything since Vega$ pretty much, and even then I've only put up like half of those. In any case I wanted to get these out for several reasons:

A:) There's a fuckton of them. I took 91 pictures that were good enough for Flickr. If I didn't do it now, I wouldn't ever bother.
B:) There were a handful of my friends there who weren't able to bring cameras and I was psyched that someone else might actually want to see these.
C:) Trent. Fucking. Reznor.
D:) I'm not going to sleep any time soon.

Here we go

The show itself wasn't bad. Getting IN the place was. We had some wacky Pre-Order VIP ticket thing. This meant that we were privileged to skip the 20 second General Admission line directly in front of the GA entrance, and instead got to walk around the building to the back, then around front to the GA entrance to get on the floor. I don't get it.

By "Not Bad" you have to look at it in the context of NIN shows I've been to. I'm not a huge fan of "soundscape Trent", and really don't listen to much of the quieter stuff past about 1997. It's not that it's bad, but it's not what I go to NIN for. Generally the shows have left this material out, which is fine by me. The point of the Lights in the Sky tour is apparently to put this stuff in. Which becomes Nine Inch Phish (for me). It's great music, but between that and the lights, I could put on a Boards of Canada CD, make iTunes Visualization do its thing, and get a lot of the effect.

In the context of any other band out there, this show is more energetic, with better lights and cooler effects than pretty much anything anyone has seen.

This is not to say there wasn't any older/faster music, there was plenty, and it was good. The crowd didn't seem super excited though. I still have all my toenails (year later and the fucker hasn't grown all the way in yet), I only slightly hurt myself grabbing one kid by the back of the neck and throwing him down when he started punishing my wife for being in his way. This was not "standard pit action", this was one lone asshole punching random people. I gather it was his first show, and I hope he enjoys the souvenir fingerprints that will be around his neck for the next week or so.

I really enjoyed being on the floor again, it's great to see Trent's intensity, and I wasn't paying attention I guess when Robin Finke started touring with him again. I was really psyched and at least /I/ jumped around some. This was also our second Josh Freese show this year, the other being DEVO. He was playing great as he has every other time I've seen shows with him.

The openers were Health. They kind of sucked. The crowd REALLY REALLY wanted to like them, but over time, it became apparent that it wasn't happening, at least tonight. A couple of points can be made.

-- If you're going to play with your back to the audience the whole time, or kneel on the floor because you don't believe in keyboard stands, the crowd will justifiably punish your ass.
-- If your microphone doesn't work, don't keep trying to scream in it, you just look stupid.
-- If your bass makes exactly the same noise no matter where your hands are on the neck, don't keep moving them around like it matters. That is insulting to your audience.

They really could have had the audience on their side, and they did for the first half of their set or so, until it was clear that they seemed to be the laptoppiest laptop band in the history of laptops. There were times where even the guitar was a backing track (or at least, neither guitarist was playing a guitar, tell me I'm lying). Turns out the guy who was screaming into a completely non-functional mic all night had a really chilling Metal Scream, which just got him laughed at because it was the last song and he hadn't made a discernible noise all night. The set's Win Quotient would have increased by a factor of 10 if he'd had a functional mic. And his fly was down. Thankfully we didn't see wang. I didn't dislike the music as much as Natalie did.

Worse than Mike Patton bands (Fantomas, Tomahawk), I swear it. They looked like this:

Here are my top several NIN photos, again, there are 91 in the Flickr Set:

also wik, also also wik

This is pretty much the cover for the UK version of the Head Like A Hole Single (Plus Trent):


It seems Trent has hurt himself today:



This is the last note of the show, Trent was raising his hand to wave and walk off.