EatOrBeEaten

Nine Inch Nails. The kind of band that, for a certain age group at least, carries a heavy weight of expectation. I was 15 when I got my hands on a copy of The Downward Spiral, and like so many other mopey teenagers in eyeliner it became the soundtrack to my teenage angst and late-night poetry-writing. It’s been a decade but they’re still my go-to group when I want to hear that someone is feeling more whiny than me. Despite their reputation as being more of a tribute band of themselves these days, I was incredibly excited to get some tickets for this gig, thinking it would be an incredibly popular sell-out.

Hmm.

The Vector Arena is one of those soulless McVenues, but what crowd there was made an effort to look the part and make it feel slightly less than a corporate jolly. Their effort in dressing up matched their enthusiasm when the band let rip with 1,000,000, Letting You and Discipline, making some otherwise lacklustre songs sound positively violent. The band sounded tight and like they were enjoying being up there, despite Trent’s assertion that the band “didn’t know what the heck it was doing”. Some timely instrumental interludes from The Fragile gave those of us with a desire to sweat and jump around a much-needed breather at regular intervals. What this says about me and the age of Nine Inch Nails fans that we need such breaks is debatable.

The band played some tracks from earlier albums, which got those us who remember albums like Broken and Pretty Hate Machine good reason to shake off our old age torpor. Terrible Lie in particular set the crowd on fire, and tracks like Burn sounded vital and new. Even Hurt, a track I have always considered to be horribly overrated, sounded good, though I had to smile at lines like “I wear my crown of shit/upon my liar’s chair” turned into something you’d hear on football terraces as it was yelled out by thousands of emoting Gen Xers.

Trent’s admission that this would “probably” be their last ever gig in NZ (he’s since announced that NiN will be on indefinite hiatus- also known as System of a down Syndrome) did not go down well with the crowd, and neither did their lack of an encore. Iconoclast that I am, I can live without hearing Closer or Starfuckers Inc. but I felt that With Teeth was under-represented, and despite Head Like a Hole turning into a fist-pumping, screaming advert for raging against the machine, it wasn’t enough.

I’m glad I saw them live at least once, and I’ve never been to a gig where I knew every song played, but I felt slightly short-changed. Not by much, but a little.