NIN/JA Tour, Mansfield MA

[music | Pigface - Alles Ist Mine (DJ? Acucrack remix)]

I've been looking forward to seeing The Coup again since 2006. They're probably best known for the unfortunately timed release of the Party Music LP . In 2006 they opened for Les Claypool and damn near stole the show for me. Unfortunately I haven't bought the Street Sweeper Social Club CD yet, so I knew pretty much none of their music except the couple tracks I had listened to once. This is much more rock-with-a-rapper than The Coup, and it lacks a lot of the funk that makes me love The Coup, but they're different bands. Street Sweeper was good, and Tom Morello is great. In addition to their own songs, they covered the Paper Planes by M.I.A. Also, Boots Riley is simply a blurry guy, and cannot be photographed. And since we're talking about sampling a sample of a Clash song, Why doesn't anyone cover Guns of Brixton?

I've seen Nine Inch Nails many, many times, and as always the show was great. This was a little different format to allow for Jane's Addiction's set, so the sets were kind of short, but NIN played a fast-paced set and fit in lots of material into the relatively short time they had. This was a much faster-paced show than in November, for instance, which had a lot more concept-type instrumentals. It's sad to think this might be the final tour, though I never buy that. It was quite a while between tours in the '90s for instance. We'll miss you Trent, until you come back around.

During the NIN set, Natalie started elbowing me to death, and said "HUMANWINE" and was pointing. So I started looking around and thought I saw a guy who looked like M@, and was looking around for Holly, but saw nothing. Turns out that Holly was about 4" off my port bow, and I was looking over her to look for her. If I'd noticed her I surely would have tapped her and let her know how much we loved watching them work, and how we plan to watch them again soon, as well as to ask to get a pic with her. Seriously, go see HUMANWINE. Funnest. Live. Show. Ever. As an example of how ridiculous it is that I was staring right at this girl and didn't notice her, see this tattoo evidence:

This was my first time seeing Jane's Addiction, and I couldn't have been happier with their set. We don't see enough absolute shredding guitar hero Rock Stars and I loved watching Dave Navarro tear these songs up. Sound-wise it was pretty bass-heavy, but they were loud and hard, and that's what I wanted. They closed the set with Stop! and acoustic Jane Says. They played most everything I'd wanted to hear and they played it loud. And with good lights, and fun outfits.

Here's my attempt at explaining myself on the quality of these photos. I suck. I think I forgot how to take pictures during the NIN set, which is super hard for me to take decent pictures of in the first place with so much strobing backlighting. The Jane's Addiction set turned out much better, though it's a bit of a Navarro-fest. What can I say, he's a very pretty man.

I also learned that digital zoom is sold by charlatans, to morons. I'd never tried using it before and it was a huge mistake. We were back far enough that it seemed like a good idea at the time, and the pics looked pretty reasonable on the camera as I took them, but man did it make them all pixellated. Live and learn I guess, here are some of the better ones from the night, more here:

Pictures